Freedom in the Clouds
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2011-10-21 · 1:35:48 · 13,586 words
ideologycapitalismpsychoanalysishegel-dialecticscinema-art-cultureecology-climatedemocracyrevolution-violenceliberalism-political-correctnessphilosophy-generaleveryday-life
Delivered as the Stanley Fish Lecture at UIC, Žižek argues that ideology today operates not through direct falsehood but through what is left unsaid, the 'determinate absence' structuring apparent transparency. Moving from a critique of charity capitalism and lifestyle ecology through Lacan, Hegel, and Hollywood examples (They Live, Ninotchka, Brassed Off), he diagnoses how apparent immediacy (SixthSense technology, harassment discourse, organic consumerism) mystifies structural antagonisms. He closes by endorsing the Occupy moment as an opening for thought rather than a programme, insisting that widening the space of what is imaginable as possible is the proper task of intellectuals.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 16
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The elusive object-cause of desire invoked in the introduction to characterize Žižek's lecture as that which is about to become attainable, unlike the forever-unattainable objet a.
as “charity capitalism”
The ideological operation by which humanitarian gestures (donate, recycle, buy Starbucks) substitute for structural critique and instruct people to stop thinking by giving a cheap ten dollars.
Chesterton's ironic figure for thinkers who detect future political crimes in philosophical texts; Žižek inverts it to argue that real philosophy instead reveals how a system undermines its own premises.
For Hegel, to locate a phenomenon in its totality means including all its distortions, antagonisms, and inconsistencies, not discovering a hidden harmony, so Congo is internal to global capitalism, not an exception.
Lacan's figure (deployed by Žižek) for ordinary sexuality: the real other functions merely as a prop to stage one's own fantasies rather than as a genuine alterity; virtual sex makes this structure visible.
The SixthSense device and similar technologies produce a fake return to a pre-modern universe where meaning resides in things, retroactively revealing that the pre-modern experience itself was already a fake.
as “determinate absence”
What is ideologically operative is not what is said but what is structurally absent, the missing ingredient whose specific character (coffee without milk vs. coffee without cream) determines meaning.
A quasi-Brechtian Protestant-theological premise that man is by nature corrupt, deployed by Žižek to argue we should change systems/newspapers rather than people.
Bazin's term (used approvingly) for films like Shane and High Noon: Westerns that take the Western genre itself as their own higher normative reference, like coffee that is its own supplement.
as “surplus enjoyment / ideological bribe”
Totalitarianism and ideology do not simply demand sacrifice, they always also bribe subjects with a false transgressive enjoyment (lynching, pedophilia, carnival) that sustains the system.
Actions (shouting at the TV, buying organic apples) that give subjects the feeling of doing something while structurally enabling them to avoid what really needs to be done.
The classical Marxist category Žižek says must be radically expanded: today the system systematically produces permanently unemployable people, not merely a temporary reserve.
as “amour de soi”
Rousseau's natural self-love, easily reconciled with the common good through reason, contrasted with amour-propre as the origin of genuine evil.
as “decaffeinated other”
The multicultural other stripped of its genuinely disturbing qualities, celebrated for sanitized holistic attitudes while its real antagonistic dimensions are suppressed.
as “clinching blackmail”
The move (exemplified by Clinton) of demanding that protesters convert vague radical dissatisfaction into a concrete programmatic demand, thereby already incorporating it into the hegemonic system.
Lacan's point that jealousy is pathological even when factually justified, used by Žižek to illustrate that ideological critique is not about positive truth but about the inherent untruth of the ideological position itself.
Stories he reaches for 17
A customer orders coffee without cream; the waiter says they only have milk, so offers coffee without milk instead. The customer gets the same result, but what is absent (cream vs. milk) makes the negation different, the determinate absent ingredient matters.
“Sorry but we have run out of cream, we only have milk, so can I bring you coffee without milk, not coffee without cream?”
An encounter in Missoula, Montana: a Native American tells Žižek he prefers 'Indian' because at least the name is a monument to the stupidity of white men, and mocks the patronizing 'holistic attitude towards nature' attribution by citing research on Indigenous forest-burning and buffalo-killing.
“I prefer to be called Indian. At least then my name is a monument to the stupidity of white men.”
John Carpenter's film features a homeless man who finds glasses that reveal advertising's true subliminal messages. Žižek notes the film is smarter than it looks: truth requires glasses (education), freedom isn't free (ten-minute fight to get the friend to put them on), and the real hidden content is enjoyment/obscenity, not the direct ideological injunction.
“To see the truth, the true message, you have to put glasses on. Truth doesn't come spontaneously.”
A woman invites the hero up for coffee; he says he doesn't drink coffee; she says no problem, she has none. Nothing is said, something is offered then retracted, yet the result is an unmistakeable obscene sexual invitation.
“No problem, I don't have any.”
Buying organic apples gives consumers the feeling of saving the earth even though most don't really believe they are healthier; like shouting at the TV to influence the game, it is a form of magical thinking that substitutes for real action.
“Even when I buy apples, I'm part of a big project to save the mother earth.”
A French dating agency ad promises to 'trouver' (find yourself) in love 'sans tomber' (without falling), used by Žižek and Badiou to diagnose the narcissistic outsourcing of love's vulnerability.
“We will enable you to find yourself in love without the fall.”
Darian Leader's reading: all the alien intrusions in X-Files exist to cover up the fact that nothing happens sexually between the two leads, the supernatural is a displacement of absent erotic resolution.
“All these poor aliens have to bang on our doors.”
In mid-April (of the talk's year) China banned time-travel and alternate-reality topics in all narrative media (cinema, TV, novels). Žižek reads this as a hopeful sign that Chinese people still need to be prevented from imagining alternatives, whereas in the West we no longer even need censorship because we cannot imagine alternatives.
“The tragedy of us is that we don't even need this censorship, we already cannot imagine it.”
Boris Groys revealed that Bakhtin (exiled to Kazan) did not celebrate carnival but coded Stalinist purges in his Rabelais book, the real carnival was the purges where today's Politburo member is tomorrow's Gulag traitor.
“Far from celebrating carnival, his book on Rabelais it's a kind of a coded theory of Stalinist purges.”
The Kinder Surprise egg is chocolate with a plastic toy inside, it literally materializes the promise that every commodity makes: that there is 'something more' in it. Žižek uses it as a figure for the commodity's surplus object.
“We know what's your dream, in commodity there is something more, well, here you have it this stupid plastic toy, here you have it.”
Marx wrote to Engels expressing deep worry that revolutionaries wanted revolution immediately while he hadn't finished Capital, Žižek uses this as a model for the intellectual's proper relation to practice: theory first, don't concede to the blackmail of immediacy.
“What are these guys doing? They want revolution now, I haven't yet finished Capital.”
A man enters a store and asks if they have no butter. The clerk corrects him: this is the store that doesn't have toilet paper, the store that doesn't have butter is down the street. The joke illustrates how determinate absence (which thing is missing) matters ideologically.
“We are the store which doesn't have toilet paper, not butter. The other store there is the one which doesn't have butter.”
Starbucks charges more per coffee but includes a percentage for Guatemalan children or desert water; the ideological trick is that anti-consumerist solidarity is included in the commodity price, so you never have to stop being a consumerist.
“The price of redemption, anti-consumerist price for solidarity, we include it in the price of a commodity.”
In The Man Who Was Thursday Chesterton ironically proposes a corps of philosophical detectives who read future crimes in books of sonnets and Plato's dialogues. Žižek uses the figure to critique the 'from Plato to NATO' tradition but inverts the policeman's role: true philosophers show systems subverting themselves.
“We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed.”
Reagan denied being close to Holocaust deniers by saying 'whenever at my dinner someone denies the Holocaust I always fight him', which raises the question of what kind of friends he has. Used by Žižek as a model of the 'Reagan mistake': debating something already legitimises it.
“Whenever at my dinner someone denies Holocaust, I always fight him.”
A fairy offers a Slovene farmer a free cow but warns the neighbor gets two; the farmer says: 'No, kill one of my cows but kill two of the neighbor's.' Illustrates amour-propre, the other's loss matters more than one's own gain.
“No, rather kill one of my cows but kill two of the neighbor.”
On a United Airlines inflight magazine Žižek reads a piece suggesting busy executives should outsource their love life, mirroring the logic of the dating agency, love as managed service for narcissists.
“Isn't it time for an active businessman or woman today to outsource love life?”
Works invoked 24
Capital book
Marx's unfinished magnum opus; cited via the letter to Engels anecdote as a model of intellectual priority over premature revolutionary action.
Ninotchka film
Lubitsch's film; the coffee-without-cream scene is the lecture's central motif for determinate absence.
They Live film
John Carpenter's film; Žižek calls it 'one of the true masterpieces of Hollywood left' and uses it to articulate the ideology-glasses theory and the reversal of direct/implicit message.
The Da Vinci Code book
Dan Brown novel/film; the absent sexuality between Langdon and Sophia forces Christ himself into erotic service, illustrates determinate absence and the decline of erotic resolution.
Brassed Off film
English working-class drama with Ewan McGregor; the coffee/no-coffee dialogue is Žižek's main illustration of implied meaning and determinate absence.
Listed among Žižek's major works in the introduction.
Listed among Žižek's major works in the introduction.
Quantum of Solace film
James Bond film called 'politically quite progressive'; the first Bond without a concluding sex scene, used to document the disappearance of erotic resolution.
Listed among Žižek's major works in the introduction.
The X-Files tv
Used via Darian Leader's reading: alien intrusions displace absent sexuality between the leads, exemplifying determinate absence.
The Lost Symbol book
Described as 'one of the big candidates for the worst novel of all times'; even erotic tension is absent, used to document a cultural trend.
Chesterton's novel; the philosophical policeman passage opens the lecture and structures the argument about philosophy's proper relationship to the political.
24 tv
The final season is preferred by Žižek to feel-good liberal cinema because it ends in radical deadlock rather than resolution.
Silver Blaze book
Sherlock Holmes story by Conan Doyle; the 'dog that did nothing' is Žižek's paradigm case of determinate absence.
Bakhtin's work; Žižek (via Groys) argues it is not a celebration of carnival but a coded theory of Stalinist purges, the left's enthusiasm for it is misguided.
Lenin famously read it in Switzerland while the world was in turmoil, cited as a model for intellectual priority.
High Noon film
Cited alongside Shane as a meta-Western; used to illustrate reflexive self-supplementation.
Opera's Second Death book
Žižek's own book, mentioned in the introduction by Walter Benn Michaels as covering Wagner and Puccini.
Pursued film
Raoul Walsh's Western-film noir hybrid with Robert Mitchum; cited as a 'very good one' in the history of genre hybridization.
Mentioned as an example of Western-musical hybrid genre, illustrating the crisis of the Western form.
Shane film
Cited alongside High Noon as Bazin's meta-Western, a genre example used to illustrate the concept of a commodity becoming its own supplement.
Go West film
A late Marx Brothers film Žižek considers 'otherwise not so good'; the 'don't count it' scene illustrates manipulated implication.
Do the Right Thing film
Spike Lee's film; used to illustrate how sensory intrusion (loud music, smell) functions as the real content of liberal racist tolerance discourse.
Žižek's examples of feel-good Hollywood liberalism: the ultimate message is how great America is that two ordinary guys can overthrow the president, which is ideologically comforting.
People invoked 30
André Bazin positive
French cinema theorist cited for the concept of meta-Westerns (Shane, High Noon) as Westerns that relate reflexively to their own genre.
Bill Clinton negative
Named as the main practitioner of 'clinching blackmail': demanding protesters translate dissatisfaction into a specific programme already contained within the hegemonic system.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive
French theorist of catastrophe; Žižek credits him with showing how capitalism's contingency and injustice are what make it ideologically tolerable.
Claude Lévi-Strauss positive
Cited for the idea that the prohibition of incest is an answer to a question we don't know, used as a model for treating protests as answers whose right question we must formulate.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Part of the Frankfurt School pair cited for the pessimism/optimism maxim; also identified as one who understood that totalitarianism always bribes with false transgression.
Emmanuel Levinas negative
Grouped with Popper as subscribing to the 'from Plato to NATO' tradition linking philosophical totality to political totalitarianism.
Cited for the historical irony that his bet that only capitalism could save China has been inverted: now only China seems to be saving capitalism.
Jacques Lacan positive
Described as Žižek's 'favorite dogmatic point of reference'; used for the masturbation/real partner thesis and the pathological jealousy example.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Žižek calls him his 'preferred theologian' and opens the lecture with a quote from The Man Who Was Thursday, though ultimately corrects Chesterton's philosophical policeman idea.
Mikhail Bakhtin negative
Žižek (via Groys) debunks the left's enthusiasm for Bakhtin's carnival as utopian; the carnival was in fact a coded figure for Stalinist terror.
Al Gore negative
Blamed Descartes in an earlier book for ecological catastrophe, used by Žižek as an example of the typical scapegoating logic.
Robert Pfaller positive
Austrian philosopher friend who drew attention to paradoxes of magical thinking (shouting at the TV) as instances of pseudo-activity.
Walter Benn Michaels positive
UIC professor who introduced Žižek and is acknowledged as sharing a concern for class analysis over multiculturalism.
Pranav Mistry positive
Indian inventor at MIT Media Lab of SixthSense; Žižek uses his device and rhetoric (end of Cartesian alienation) as the central ideological case study.
Stanley Fish positive
The lecture is given in Fish's honour; Žižek expresses intellectual affection ('fell in love with you') for Fish's defence of doing humanities without political guilt, and imagines a shared 'dogmatic Stalinist spirit'.
Alain Badiou positive
Described as 'my good friend'; Badiou drew Žižek's attention to the dating agency advertisement about falling in love without falling.
Fredric Jameson positive
Named as deliverer of the inaugural Stanley Fish Lecture; Žižek later alludes to 'Fred's' formulation that we can imagine the end of the world but not a small change in capitalism.
Mentioned in passing: Žižek says he supports Assange 'in a very specific way' but the broader point is about the difference between total transparency and the proper management of implication.
Bertolt Brecht positive
Žižek says he doesn't like Brecht much, but appreciates the implicit Protestant theology of the Fall and the Herr Keuner story: change newspapers, not people.
Ernesto Laclau negative
Mentioned (via Walter Benn Michaels in the introduction) for accusing Žižek of using class as a deus ex machina against multicultural devils; Walter Benn Michaels's tone implies Žižek rejects this charge.
Darian Leader positive
British Lacanian friend who proposed the reading of X-Files aliens as cover for absent sexuality between the two leads.
Walter Benjamin positive
Cited (as 'the other Walter') for the insight that capitalism has the structure of a perverted religious ethics, expansion of capital must continue regardless of utilitarian cost.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau positive
Cited for the distinction between amour de soi (natural) and amour-propre (perverted/evil), which Žižek uses to diagnose the true engine of capitalism.
Boris Groys positive
Russian art theorist and friend; revealed from Bakhtin's archives that Rabelais and His World was a coded theory of Stalinist purges rather than a celebration of carnival.
Dan Brown positive
Described as 'the lowest of the lowest' yet used productively: The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol exemplify the disappearance of erotic resolution in contemporary popular culture.
Max Horkheimer positive
Cited for the Frankfurt School maxim 'pessimism in theory, optimism in practice' which Adorno also repeated.
Karl Popper negative
One of the thinkers said to subscribe to the 'philosophical police' tradition of reading totalitarianism into philosophical notions of totality.
Karl Marx positive
The Marx Žižek likes is the one who wrote to Engels worrying that the revolution would interrupt him finishing Capital, a model for proper intellectual priority.
Described as 'one of the bad guys that I like', blamed by Al Gore and others for ecological catastrophe through the Cartesian subject/object gap; Žižek is ambivalent, finding him a useful scapegoat.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central to the lecture's methodology: Hegel's notion of totality as including all antagonisms, and the formula that thinking begins when distortion becomes constitutive.
What it argues
determinate absence and what ideology leaves unsaidcharity capitalism and consumerist pseudo-activitySixthSense technology as staged immediacy and ideological projectionthe declining figure of erotic love in late-capitalist cultureOccupy Wall Street and the politics of not having an answerexpanding the space of the imaginable as intellectual dutytotality as constitutive antagonism, not harmonious wholeness
Dialectical moves 9
“The true utopia is not to change things — the true utopia is that things can go on indefinitely the way they are.”
Žižek inverts the standard accusation of utopianism: those demanding modest change are realists, those believing in the sustainability of present capitalism are the true utopians.
“Virtual sex does not replace real sex — it retroactively reveals that sex always already was virtual.”
The apparent innovation (virtual sex) does not corrupt an original pure state but makes visible the fantasy-structure that was always already operative in 'real' sex.
“SixthSense does not represent a radical break with our everyday experience — it openly stages what was always the case.”
Apparent technological novelty is in fact an explication of the always-already ideological structure of perception.
“The direct message is the obscenity / pleasure — the implicit message is the injunction that sustains it (inverting They Live).”
In They Live the critical content is what you see without the glasses (direct obscenity), not with them, reversing the standard model where ideology is hidden and truth is direct.
“Far from tolerance meaning you tolerate the other, 'no harassment' precisely means: I don't tolerate your over-proximity.”
Tolerance discourse covertly demands that the other remain at a comfortable distance, i.e. it is itself a form of intolerance.
“The contingency and injustice of capitalism are not obstacles to its legitimacy — they are what makes capitalism palpable.”
The apparent defect of capitalist randomness (undeserved outcomes) is what sustains subjects' psychological investment in the system by allowing losers to save face.
“The technologically reconstructed fake pre-modernity retroactively makes the pre-modern experience itself something which was a fake.”
The new technological imitation does not corrupt an authentic origin; rather, it reveals the original was never authentic.
“To philosophize is not to destroy the system — it is to observe how the system is undermining its own premises.”
The philosopher's task is immanent critique, showing self-subversion, not external attack.
“Pessimism in theory, optimism in practice: hope can only emerge as a necessary by-product of honest pessimistic analysis.”
Directly aiming at hope is counter-productive; it must emerge as an unintended consequence of rigorous critical work.
Claims 17
asserts
Ideology today operates not through direct lies but through the manipulation of implications — what is left unsaid, the determinate absence, is more ideologically operative than what is stated.ideology
asserts
Charity capitalism (Starbucks, humanitarian ads, organic consumerism) does not supplement but replaces structural critique: it allows subjects to remain consumerists while feeling redeemed, making it more ideologically effective than old-fashioned consumerism.charity capitalism
asserts
The SixthSense gestural interface does not represent a radical break but makes explicit what was always the case: our perceptions are already structured by ideological projections just as racist prejudice projects meaning onto the other's face.technology and ideology
rejects
The demand that protesters articulate a specific positive programme is itself an ideological blackmail that pre-empts genuine dissatisfaction by forcing it into hegemonic forms.Occupy Wall Street / Clinton's demand for a programme
asserts
Capitalism's contingency and injustice are not obstacles to its legitimacy but its ideological condition of possibility: they allow losers to retain dignity by attributing their failure to chance rather than merit.ideology of capitalism / contingency
reframes
The true utopia is the belief that present capitalist arrangements can continue indefinitely; those who want minor changes are therefore the real anti-utopians.utopianism
asserts
The marriage between capitalism and democracy is breaking down, evidenced by China and Singapore demonstrating that authoritarian capitalism is more dynamic and productive than liberal-democratic capitalism.capitalism and democracy
reframes
Capitalism is not driven by greed or egotism but by amour-propre — the need for the other to lose matters more than one's own winning; therefore moral critiques of greed miss the structural point.critique of capitalism
asserts
Pessimism in theory is compatible with optimism in practice: hope can only emerge as a necessary by-product of honest pessimistic analysis, not from directly aiming at it.intellectual duty / hope
rejects
Abstract academic work (studying Milton, etc.) should not be subordinated to immediate humanitarian demands, which are themselves a new language of power prohibiting genuine thought.the blackmail of immediacy / charity ideology
reframes
Harassment discourse functions ideologically by reformulating 'don't come too close to me as a desiring being' as tolerance, inverting its proclaimed intent.harassment / tolerance
asserts
In love, unlike ordinary sexuality structured as masturbation with a real partner, one genuinely reaches out to the other including their imperfections.love and sexuality
reframes
The problems remaining from the communist tradition are the problems of the commons — ecology, biogenetics — not the political forms of Leninist party organization.communism / commons
reframes
The Hegel notion of totality does not mean discovering hidden harmony but including all distortions and antagonisms as constitutive of the system — Congo is internal to global capitalism, not an exception.Hegelian totality
asserts
The distortion of a notion becomes philosophically significant when it is shown to be constitutive of the notion itself, not merely a failure of application.Hegelian dialectics / ideology
asserts
Racism functions like the SixthSense device: ideological prejudices are projected onto the perceived other, making innocent gestures appear as confirmation of prejudice.racism / ideology
asserts
The intellectual task today is to widen the scope of what is considered possible and impossible, not to provide positive programmatic answers.role of intellectuals
Quotes 17
“The true utopia is not to change things. Unfortunately the true utopia is that the way they are, things can go on indefinitely.”Slavoj Žižek · inversion of utopianism
“Pessimism in theory, optimism in practice. We don't need optimism in theory, cheap one.”Slavoj Žižek · theory vs. practice / Frankfurt School maxim
“Today ideology is not so much in what is directly said but you must locate the determinate absence. What is not said but implied.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as determinate absence
“SixthSense does not simply represent a radical break with our everyday experience. Rather, it openly stages what was always the case.”Slavoj Žižek · technology externalises what ideology always does
“The tragedy of us is that we don't even need this censorship, we already cannot imagine it.”Slavoj Žižek · loss of utopian imagination in the West
“We can imagine the end of the world being hit by an asteroid or whatever, we cannot imagine spending a little bit more on health care.”Slavoj Žižek · asymmetry of the imaginable under capitalism
“In love you do not idealize your partner. In love is the magic moment when you are able to assume all the imperfections of your partner but nonetheless all the magic remains there.”Slavoj Žižek · love as acceptance of the imperfect other
“It's not enough for me to win, the other has to lose. And that matters more than me winning.”Slavoj Žižek · amour-propre / logic of envy under capitalism
“The problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system which pushes you to be corrupt.”Slavoj Žižek · structural critique vs. moral critique
“Change newspapers not people.”Slavoj Žižek · Brechtian / structural approach to change
“We cannot provide answers, maybe we can ask the right questions.”Slavoj Žižek · intellectual duty in the Occupy moment
“The other it celebrates is a decaffeinated other, this shitty other with holistic attitudes and so on.”Slavoj Žižek · official multiculturalism's sanitised other
“For the price of a couple of cappuccinos you can not only not care about it but even feel good that you really did something.”Slavoj Žižek · charity capitalism's ideological function
“What if real sex has the structure of a masturbation with a real partner?”Slavoj Žižek · fantasy structure of ordinary sexuality (Lacan)
“Don't be blackmailed by this idea... you can just study Milton or whoever here while children are starving in Somalia. This is an obscenity which shows all that is false in this charity capitalism.”Slavoj Žižek · rejecting the blackmail of immediacy
“Thinking begins for Hegel when the distortion of a notion becomes a distortion constitutive of this notion itself.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian dialectics / immanent critique
“We who just want to open up the space of questioning a little bit, we are the true anti-utopians.”Slavoj Žižek · anti-utopianism as genuine radicalism
Transcript 15 turns
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Hello everybody.
Hello everybody.
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Is this on? It’s not on? Now it is. Greetings. I know many of you have been here for a while and I thank you for coming. We’re going to get start—louder? Oh. Is it working? Closer? Oh, like that. Okay. I’m not so used to this. Okay. Welcome everybody. I’m Susan Levine, I’m the director of the Institute for the Humanities here at UIC and we’re very happy to have you all here for the Stanley Fish Lecture this year, sponsored by the Institute and the UIC College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. And we’re very pleased to have our guest this year Slavoj Žižek, who is coming from Slovenia by way of New York and we’re very happy to have you. And we’re also very happy to have Stanley Fish and Jane Tompkins back here at UIC. Welcome as well. The Stanley Fish Lecture is one of the signature events of the Institute, it happens every other year, and is one of the many public programs that we sponsor. In addition to the lectures by our faculty, we have a number of other lectures, working groups, seminars, and conferences and you can find all of the schedule on our website or you can pick up a brochure as you leave. We have a pretty wide array of humanities topics ranging from the forum for research on law, politics, and the humanities to the Chicago area food studies working group and many more in between. And I also would like to invite you to contribute to our efforts, both by coming to our events and, if you wish, by picking up an envelope outside and making a contribution to the work of the Institute for the Humanities. We have a unique role to play at UIC as a public urban university and we cherish the humanities in that realm. So this afternoon, Astrida Tantillo, the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is going to say a few words about the Stanley Fish Lecture and then Walter Benn Michaels from the UIC English department is going to introduce our speaker Slavoj Žižek. Immediately after the lecture, you are all invited to a reception at the Institute for the Humanities. It’s in the basement of Stevenson Hall and if you don’t know where that is we have maps outside for you as well. So, welcome to all and we’re looking forward to a very lively discussion this afternoon. Astrida. So welcome and good afternoon. The Stanley Fish Lecture is designed to acknowledge the achievements of Stanley Fish, who was our dean here in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences between and It was initiated by then dean Chris Comer in The lecture series has had a history of prominent scholars. The inaugural lecture was delivered in by Fredric Jameson, the William A. Lane Professor of
Is this on? It’s not on? Now it is. Greetings. I know many of you have been here for a while and I thank you for coming. We’re going to get start—louder? Oh. Is it working? Closer? Oh, like that. Okay. I’m not so used to this. Okay. Welcome everybody. I’m Susan Levine, I’m the director of the Institute for the Humanities here at UIC and we’re very happy to have you all here for the Stanley Fish Lecture this year, sponsored by the Institute and the UIC College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. And we’re very pleased to have our guest this year Slavoj Žižek, who is coming from Slovenia by way of New York and we’re very happy to have you. And we’re also very happy to have Stanley Fish and Jane Tompkins back here at UIC. Welcome as well. The Stanley Fish Lecture is one of the signature events of the Institute, it happens every other year, and is one of the many public programs that we sponsor. In addition to the lectures by our faculty, we have a number of other lectures, working groups, seminars, and conferences and you can find all of the schedule on our website or you can pick up a brochure as you leave. We have a pretty wide array of humanities topics ranging from the forum for research on law, politics, and the humanities to the Chicago area food studies working group and many more in between. And I also would like to invite you to contribute to our efforts, both by coming to our events and, if you wish, by picking up an envelope outside and making a contribution to the work of the Institute for the Humanities. We have a unique role to play at UIC as a public urban university and we cherish the humanities in that realm. So this afternoon, Astrida Tantillo, the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is going to say a few words about the Stanley Fish Lecture and then Walter Benn Michaels from the UIC English department is going to introduce our speaker Slavoj Žižek. Immediately after the lecture, you are all invited to a reception at the Institute for the Humanities. It’s in the basement of Stevenson Hall and if you don’t know where that is we have maps outside for you as well. So, welcome to all and we’re looking forward to a very lively discussion this afternoon. Astrida. So welcome and good afternoon. The Stanley Fish Lecture is designed to acknowledge the achievements of Stanley Fish, who was our dean here in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences between and It was initiated by then dean Chris Comer in The lecture series has had a history of prominent scholars. The inaugural lecture was delivered in by Fredric Jameson, the William A. Lane Professor of
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Comparative Literature and Romance Languages at Duke University, who spoke on how to fulfill a wish. In the Stanley Fish Lecture was given by Stephen Greenblatt, the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University, on Shakespeare and the limits of hatred. Most recently Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor, University of California Berkeley, presented on the frames of war. The Stanley Fish Lecture has been sponsored by my college and the Institute of the Humanities along with the generous contribution in by the president of the New Century Bank, Fay Pantazelos. Other generous contributors have also supported previous lectures and we are quite grateful to them. We are probably all very well acquainted with Stanley’s stature as a scholar and public intellectual. I would like to say a few words about Stanley’s accomplishments during his years as dean here. When he came to UIC, it was with a mandate to put us on the map. His arrival in time here were well documented from the Chronicle of Higher Education to The New
Comparative Literature and Romance Languages at Duke University, who spoke on how to fulfill a wish. In the Stanley Fish Lecture was given by Stephen Greenblatt, the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University, on Shakespeare and the limits of hatred. Most recently Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor, University of California Berkeley, presented on the frames of war. The Stanley Fish Lecture has been sponsored by my college and the Institute of the Humanities along with the generous contribution in by the president of the New Century Bank, Fay Pantazelos. Other generous contributors have also supported previous lectures and we are quite grateful to them. We are probably all very well acquainted with Stanley’s stature as a scholar and public intellectual. I would like to say a few words about Stanley’s accomplishments during his years as dean here. When he came to UIC, it was with a mandate to put us on the map. His arrival in time here were well documented from the Chronicle of Higher Education to The New
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Yorker. It was an extremely exciting time. Suddenly people were talking about UIC and they were talking about it because Stanley was here and he had big plans for us. He received especially a lot of press for the academic stars that he brought to our campus and many of these individuals are still here and contributing to the excellence of this urban, diverse, and very high energy campus. What is perhaps not as well known about his years here is that it was not just about the big names that he brought here to build our reputation, it was the high number of junior scholars that he hired. By the time he had stepped down as dean, he had hired a third of our faculty. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is still very much the house that Stanley built. I’ve had many opportunities to think about his legacy in terms of creating a faculty because this university, as many others, has had years of budget cuts and we have suffered significant faculty losses. The excellence of Stanley’s hires, though, has continued to make itself known. Our faculty are bringing in substantially more grants and winning many more awards than ever before, despite our smaller numbers. I worked with Stanley while he was dean here, and whenever I would meet colleagues, they would ask me: what is it like to work with him? He was a great mentor as an administrator because he always saw the big picture of why we were here. He always ridiculed senseless bureaucracy and tried to fight it in every way. And most importantly, he conveyed a message that is all too rare in academe. It did not matter what a person’s perspective, political, social, or theoretical leanings were, he hired people on one criterion only, whether they were smart. I have never met anyone as intellectually open as Stanley. He loved a good argument and wanted to hire in a way that ensured one. It is such a pleasure to welcome Stanley and Jane back to campus, and I am sure we will have a very enjoyable afternoon.
Yorker. It was an extremely exciting time. Suddenly people were talking about UIC and they were talking about it because Stanley was here and he had big plans for us. He received especially a lot of press for the academic stars that he brought to our campus and many of these individuals are still here and contributing to the excellence of this urban, diverse, and very high energy campus. What is perhaps not as well known about his years here is that it was not just about the big names that he brought here to build our reputation, it was the high number of junior scholars that he hired. By the time he had stepped down as dean, he had hired a third of our faculty. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is still very much the house that Stanley built. I’ve had many opportunities to think about his legacy in terms of creating a faculty because this university, as many others, has had years of budget cuts and we have suffered significant faculty losses. The excellence of Stanley’s hires, though, has continued to make itself known. Our faculty are bringing in substantially more grants and winning many more awards than ever before, despite our smaller numbers. I worked with Stanley while he was dean here, and whenever I would meet colleagues, they would ask me: what is it like to work with him? He was a great mentor as an administrator because he always saw the big picture of why we were here. He always ridiculed senseless bureaucracy and tried to fight it in every way. And most importantly, he conveyed a message that is all too rare in academe. It did not matter what a person’s perspective, political, social, or theoretical leanings were, he hired people on one criterion only, whether they were smart. I have never met anyone as intellectually open as Stanley. He loved a good argument and wanted to hire in a way that ensured one. It is such a pleasure to welcome Stanley and Jane back to campus, and I am sure we will have a very enjoyable afternoon.
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So I want to be quick, but I just have to say one thing. I mean, I’ve known Stanley for a very long time and he’s one of my, you know, two or three closest friends in the world, but Astrida made him sound a lot nicer than he actually is and a lot—and she made the sort of debate thing sound a little bit anodyne, like high energy, and I want to say it’s not really like that. In fact, in a way, it’s not like that in such a way that you feel a little trepidation introducing Slavoj Žižek to give the Stanley Fish lecture. It’s like taking one very sort of combustible substance and then putting it into some other like even more horribly combustible substance. And you think on the one hand like you totally want to see what happens, but on the other, you know, you’re not sure you—like the guys in back—you could be totally happy because you’re not sure you want to be around when the explosion takes place. One has, one might say, both the impulse to get closer and the impulse to get farther away, a contradictory desire that is of course central to Žižek’s own Lacanianism, although a relevant difference between say the objet petit a and Slavoj Žižek’s Stanley Fish lecture would be that one of them is forever unattainable, whereas the other we are about to hear. It will not be, however, or not in any case not only be, as one of the foremost interpreters of Lacan that Slavoj Žižek speaks to us today. For
So I want to be quick, but I just have to say one thing. I mean, I’ve known Stanley for a very long time and he’s one of my, you know, two or three closest friends in the world, but Astrida made him sound a lot nicer than he actually is and a lot—and she made the sort of debate thing sound a little bit anodyne, like high energy, and I want to say it’s not really like that. In fact, in a way, it’s not like that in such a way that you feel a little trepidation introducing Slavoj Žižek to give the Stanley Fish lecture. It’s like taking one very sort of combustible substance and then putting it into some other like even more horribly combustible substance. And you think on the one hand like you totally want to see what happens, but on the other, you know, you’re not sure you—like the guys in back—you could be totally happy because you’re not sure you want to be around when the explosion takes place. One has, one might say, both the impulse to get closer and the impulse to get farther away, a contradictory desire that is of course central to Žižek’s own Lacanianism, although a relevant difference between say the objet petit a and Slavoj Žižek’s Stanley Fish lecture would be that one of them is forever unattainable, whereas the other we are about to hear. It will not be, however, or not in any case not only be, as one of the foremost interpreters of Lacan that Slavoj Žižek speaks to us today. For
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as he has shown an extraordinary number of books—and I’m just going to name four or five out of the—actually the list is so long you kind of get bored reading it, you know? You just can’t keep on going down. It’s like a Whitman catalog of a certain kind. But and I’m just hitting some high points: The Sublime Object of Ideology, Through the Ticklish Subject, In Defense of Lost Causes, and Living in the End Times. He is not just a brilliant interpreter of Lacan but also a brilliant reader of Hegel, Marx, Freud, and in fact in one of my absolute personal favorites, which I completely recommend to you, his book Opera’s Second Death, not only of Wagner but even of Puccini. Furthermore, and perhaps most relevant to today’s lecture, he’s become a central figure in the effort to think through the meaning of the ongoing crisis in capitalism that is currently finding expression in phenomena like Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party, or more locally in the renewed desire to form unions and the renewed desire to keep unions from being formed. In this context, a crucial element of Žižek’s importance and a crucial contributor to the controversial the controversy his work has provoked has been his effort to put class at the center of analysis. The controversy is both on the right, where the only acceptable use in the US of the term class is as an adjective modifying warfare and referring disapprovingly to poor people’s collective desire to stop being so poor, and also on the academic left, where, as chaperoned by race, gender, and sexuality, class tends to be an object of some suspicion. Which is presumably why, as a colleague pointed out to me in a discussion the other day, Ernesto Laclau has remarked that Žižek uses class as a sort of deus ex machina to play the role of the good guy against the multicultural devils. You know, and Laclau says that like it’s a bad thing. But whatever your position on these issues, if you’ve been paying any attention at all, that position has been influenced and your thinking has been sharpened by Žižek’s work. I know you all look forward as I do to his lecture, Freedom in the Clouds: What is Possible and Impossible What is Impossible Today. And I hope you will join me in welcoming him to UIC.
as he has shown an extraordinary number of books—and I’m just going to name four or five out of the—actually the list is so long you kind of get bored reading it, you know? You just can’t keep on going down. It’s like a Whitman catalog of a certain kind. But and I’m just hitting some high points: The Sublime Object of Ideology, Through the Ticklish Subject, In Defense of Lost Causes, and Living in the End Times. He is not just a brilliant interpreter of Lacan but also a brilliant reader of Hegel, Marx, Freud, and in fact in one of my absolute personal favorites, which I completely recommend to you, his book Opera’s Second Death, not only of Wagner but even of Puccini. Furthermore, and perhaps most relevant to today’s lecture, he’s become a central figure in the effort to think through the meaning of the ongoing crisis in capitalism that is currently finding expression in phenomena like Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party, or more locally in the renewed desire to form unions and the renewed desire to keep unions from being formed. In this context, a crucial element of Žižek’s importance and a crucial contributor to the controversial the controversy his work has provoked has been his effort to put class at the center of analysis. The controversy is both on the right, where the only acceptable use in the US of the term class is as an adjective modifying warfare and referring disapprovingly to poor people’s collective desire to stop being so poor, and also on the academic left, where, as chaperoned by race, gender, and sexuality, class tends to be an object of some suspicion. Which is presumably why, as a colleague pointed out to me in a discussion the other day, Ernesto Laclau has remarked that Žižek uses class as a sort of deus ex machina to play the role of the good guy against the multicultural devils. You know, and Laclau says that like it’s a bad thing. But whatever your position on these issues, if you’ve been paying any attention at all, that position has been influenced and your thinking has been sharpened by Žižek’s work. I know you all look forward as I do to his lecture, Freedom in the Clouds: What is Possible and Impossible What is Impossible Today. And I hope you will join me in welcoming him to UIC.
Slavoj Žižek
Thanks very much. I am really glad to be here. My gratitude to all of you here who helped to introduce me, and I noticed that there were three before I—I consider it beneath dignity if only one guy introduced me. There must be a guy introducing a guy introducing... No but seriously, I’m especially glad to be here because of—because of you Stanley, because you know how I intellectually fell in love with you. Didn’t you write a book years ago, I think it was a book or a text, something like "Why There Ain’t Such a Thing Like Freedom of the Speech and Why It’s Good That There Ain't"? How can—you know, like, this is rare today. Even a guy that most of us definitely doesn’t like, like George Bush, the younger the president. But my god, when he did that wonderful slip of tongue, you remember? "I think I was misunderstandestimated." How can you not love him for a brief second? The second more serious reason that I really like Stanley is for—wasn’t it you gave an interview and you were asked when you were involved in all those polemics, affirmative action and so on, but what are you? And you said much more modestly, "I am a Milton scholar, Miltonist" or what, no? Listen, this is what we should stick to today. Don’t be blackmailed by this idea which may appear a leftist idea, but it’s really the speech of those in power today, that if you are doing just abstract humanities whatever studies, they like to make you feel guilty, like, you know, like, you know all this disgustingly manipulative line of thought like, you can just study Milton or whoever here while—and then you have a list—while children are starving in Somalia or whatever. No, this you know why—this is an obscenity which shows all that is false in this charity capitalism. You know, because I remember when I was young, it’s true leftists were saying, you live in an ivory tower while people are starving. But it gave me an idea that something is wrong with this when I remember some a couple of years ago Bill Gates started to talk like that. What does it mean all the Microsoft programs when people are dying of illnesses? And then I got it what it really means when he went on: so let’s forget our ideological boring struggles, capitalism, socialism, let’s just all get together and do something. In other words, you see unfortunately the children, starving children of Somalia, not to help them, but the order is: give the stupid ten dollars to help them and stop thinking. And a true leftist doesn’t—although, sorry, I don’t mean it personally that I’m not stigma—but it’s not like that. I hope Stanley that at least we agree on one thing. The Marx that maybe we both like is you know which one? In or okay, it wasn’t really the possibility of a revolution, but like it appeared to some guys maybe there will be a revolution. And then there is a unique letter from Marx to Engels which expresses Marx’s deep worry like, "What are these these guys doing? They want revolution now, I haven’t yet finished Capital, you know, what are they..." I mean, that’s the attitude. And all great guys are doing this. The world was in turmoil what did Lenin do? He went to Switzerland and started reading Hegel’s Logic and so on. I mean, don’t, don’t, don’t concede to this cheap blackmail which is really a new form to prohibit thinking. If you play this game of how can you spend money here when what I mean—no, you this is the new language of power today. So this is why I really feel here solidarity with you. And for another reason I feel solidarity, because even when—take this as a friendly gesture—even when maybe if ever I take power and if you are still alive, maybe you will have to take a special one-way train to Siberia or whatever you call it, no? But still where you are at the best is, you know, today we don’t need these well well-meaning liberals who always like paint to you some light at the end of the tunnel, things better. What is most needed today is just an honest description of a deadlock that we are in. As already the old Frankfurt School guy Max Horkheimer said once and Adorno repeated it: "Pessimism in theory, optimism in practice." We don’t need optimism in theory, cheap one. This is why, to provoke you, when somebody asked me recently okay, what is good what is bad in Hollywood today? I told him what I really hate is this feel-good so-called Hollywood Marxism, you know, like Pelican Brief, All the President’s Men. It may appear very critical. My god, the president himself was corrupted together with some big company. But why do these films make us feel so good? Because you know, the ultimate message is so comfortable: My god, what a great country we live in where two ordinary guys can overthrow the mightiest man in the universe. And my provocation was, I’m sorry to tell you, I prefer to this cheap liberalism. I’m talking very seriously about the last season—I didn’t see it all, I don’t have time—but the end. You remember what happened there? Jack Bauer is no longer this kind of a Himmler style guy who is you know this right-wing hero where the idea is as Himmler put it, everyone can be a hero in the sense of doing good things for his nation, a true hero is the one who is ready to dirty his hands, to torture, to do horrible things. But towards the end he is no longer that, he gets totally desperate, he says everything must come open, I cannot live with it. And his positive opposite Allison Taylor, the more liberal president, also gets entangled in a deadlock, has to step down. So what I like is that there is no, as we put it, bullshitting. The the series ends up with a radical deadlock. Within present coordinates it simply practically impossible to find an ethical position. Isn’t this a much more sobering lecture than you know that feel-good liberalism and so on and so on? That’s the spirit we need today. Don’t go into this blackmail like you will bring us you are bringing us only the bad news. No, the good—the good news are I claim, I hope we again agree here Stanley, the good news should be like things like dignity or whatever which are so-called they are necessary necessary by-products. If you directly aim at them it’s counter-productive. You know if you try to act with dignity it’s ridiculous. It must emerge spontaneously from... So I claim that if there is a hope today, it can only emerge as a necessary by-product of our pessimistic analysis. It’s not that you paint it directly. So okay, after this stuff let’s go to work. Okay. I would like to begin with a wonderful quote from my maybe known to some of you I’m sorry of my preferred theologian G.K. Chesterton, who in his novel The Man Who Was Thursday ironically proposed to install a quote "Special corps of policemen, policemen who are also philosophers." Here is a quote from Chesterton: "The work of the philosophical policeman is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to coffee houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a diary that a crime has been committed; we discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed," and so on and so on. This may appear ridiculous but would thinkers as different as Karl Popper, Theodor Adorno, Emmanuel Levinas not subscribe to a slightly changed version of this idea, where actual political crime is called totalitarianism and the philosophical crime is condensed in the notion of totality? A straight road leads from the philosophy’s philosophical notion of totality to political totalitarianism, so these guys claim. And so the task of political, sorry, philosophical police is to discover from a book of Plato’s dialogues or a treatise on social contract by Rousseau that a political crime like Gulag whatever will be committed, as we said it when I was young from Plato to NATO line. The ordinary political policeman goes to secret organizations to arrest revolutionaries; the philosophical policeman goes to philosophical symposia to detect proponents of totality, and so on and so on. It’s a nice provocative idea, this idea by Chesterton, but I think at one crucial point he is nonetheless wrong. We philosophers, at our best at least, when we are truly philosophers, we don’t try to destroy the system. We just observe and bring out signs, features which demonstrate that the system is undermining its own premises, undercutting itself. This is why permit me a brief detour through Hegel. This is why I like Hegel’s notion of totality. It has nothing to do in Hegel this notion with this kind of a theological large encompassing sorry encompassing unity. You know, like this may appear to you something horrible but if you look from it all, oh it’s just part of the divine harmony and so on. No, for Hegel to locate a phenomenon into its totality does not mean to see the hidden harmony of the whole, but to include into a system all its distortions, antagonisms, inconsistencies and so on and so on. This is for Hegel totality. For example, to make a quick jump to today’s global politics, to observe capitalism as a totality doesn’t mean that I should be telling you some nice fables about global market bringing peace, prosperity, democracy, but to include into capitalism also phenomena for example like Congo. Take Congo which is probably the hell on earth today, a country where according to Time magazine report a couple of years ago five million people died in the last years for unnatural reasons, a state which even doesn’t function as a state. Look at it closely and you will see it’s not some kind of Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness out of our civilization; as such it’s fully included in global capitalism. Most of the metals, some I mean most some component components of our computers which make them workable come from Congo and so on and so on. So to put it in more philosophical terms, thinking begins for Hegel when the distortion of a notion—like you have a certain notion capitalism, democracy, and things are not well so you say no they didn’t apply it correctly it’s a distortion—the distortion of a notion becomes a distortion constitutive of this notion itself. You demonstrate how something which appears to be just a result of misapplication, incomplete realization of a project, is a necessary constituent of this project. Again back to Congo, the point is to demonstrate that it’s not that some of us here in Scandinavia are happy to live in highly developed capitalism, others slowly will approach it. No, the point is that we here Scandinavia and Congo, we are all parts of the same of the same totality. What does this mean, this brief methodological introduction? How can we disengage or rather step acquire a minimal distance towards ideology today? Because we are being told repeatedly ideology no longer exists and so on and so on. To give you a good example of how ideology and technology can be deeply, almost inextricably mixed with each other, I would like to recall to you—maybe you’ve heard about it—a strange invention which was developed by Pranav Mistry, an Indian who works at MIT Media Lab. He developed a wearable that you can wear, gestural interface again called SixthSense two years ago, I think. Allegedly it works; I saw the presentation on TV and so on. What happens here? All you need is—the hardware you need is a small webcam which hangs from your neck, a pocket projector and a mirror, all connected wirelessly to a smartphone in your pocket. That’s all you need. The way it works is that you as the user, you begin to handle objects and making gestures. The camera recognizes and tracks your hand gestures and the physical objects using computer vision-based techniques. Then the software processes the video stream data, reading it as a series of instructions and it retrieves the appropriate information—texts, images, and so on—from the internet. The device then projects this information onto any physical surface which is available there—walls, physical objects, whatever. What does this mean? Here are some examples of how it functions. Let’s say in a bookstore I pick up a book and just I hold it in front of me. Immediately I see projected onto the book’s cover the latest reviews, ratings, and so on. Because again the camera processes the image, the image is recognized, and then through the wireless connection all the data are mobilized, they come back, they are projected. Or if I want to check the time, I only draw the circle on my left wrist and the projector displays a clock on my right arm. Or when I hold my fingers at arm’s length to form a square, the system recognizes this gesture as framing a scene, snaps a photo and saves it. And you so you see you have this pseudo-transparency. It’s a magic universe almost. And of course, bad sexist as I am, from my I admit it male-chauvinist perspective, I immediately imagined how such a device could transform sexual interaction. Like I look at the woman and the projector immediately sorry it’s immediately projected on her her characteristics, no? Easy to seduce but likes jazz and Dostoevsky, good at fellatio, whatever you want. It’s very practical, you just look at it everything is, no? In this way the entire world becomes a multi-touch surface while the whole internet in the cloud, absent, is constantly mobilized to supply additional data. Pranav Mistry, the guy who invented this, emphasized the physical aspect of this interaction. Till now, internet-aided computers isolated the user from the surrounding environment. The archetypal internet user is a geek sitting alone in front of a screen, oblivious to the reality around him. With SixthSense, with this machines, I remain engaged in physical interaction with objects. The alternative either physical reality or virtual screen world is replaced by a direct interpenetration of the two. The projection of information directly onto the real objects with which I interact creates an almost magical mystifying effect. Things appear to continuously reveal or rather emanate their own interpretation. Paradoxically this means that the latest technological ideas bring us back to the pre-modern universe in which meaning resides in things themselves. The gap between reality and meaning, the defining feature of modernity, is undone. This is why SixthSense does not simply represent a radical break with our everyday experience. Rather, it openly stages what was always the case, and that’s what I want to insist on. What shocked me with this invention is that at its most magic, it just brings out what we are all the time doing. Just replace the computer with the big stock of our ideological prejudices and so on and so on. To return to the consciously politically incorrect bad taste example that I gave, forget about all this technology. If I am, I hope I’m not, who knows, if I am this kind of a male-chauvinist sexist, isn’t this effectively happening when I look at an attractive woman? Would she like to do this, does she like that music or whatever? Or to give you maybe a clearer example, isn’t it that racism functions exactly like that? You see a person and the as it were ideological illusion of racism is that, of course not in a literal projection but in a projection which is all the more brutal, you see there all your ideological prejudices. For example, if you are anti-semitic and the guy is a Jew and just innocently smiles, you see in this smile all the cunningness—why is he friendly to me? What does he want from me, money, does he want to cheat or you know. So again, what I like here, this is typical of the practice of ideology, is how the more the experience is immediate and you can celebrate this like that guy Pranav Mistry does as the end of this alienating Cartesian—Descartes is one of the bad guys that I like, you know—universe. I mean, he is good here to be blamed for everything. Al Gore even blamed Descartes in one of his earlier books for all the for all the catastrophes of ecology, no? Because instead of this how should I call it harmonious interpenetration between our universe and reality, we get a radical gap between our world of meaning and reality out there and so on and so on. What we get here is an apparent return to pre-modernity, but nonetheless as you mentioned already, a fake pre-modernity which in a way is not simply to be condemned because I think what is nice in this example is that it’s not that it’s a fake now. A traditional reactionary would have said, no this is a technological fake, it’s no longer a true authentic pre-modern universe. I claim yes, it is a fake, but it is a fake which retroactively makes also the pre-modern experience something which was a fake. Like to give you an a problematic example, this is I also think the catastrophe with so-called virtual sex. It’s not that now we have virtual sex once there was real sex. The problem with virtual sex is that in some sense you discover that sex always already was virtual. What do I mean by this? You know the popular definition of masturbation, which is you do it to yourself but with an imagined partner. Jacques Lacan, my favorite dogmatic point of reference, once made a wonderful remark claiming that if masturbation is a is sex with an imagined partner you are in reality alone, what if real sex has the structure of a masturbation with a real partner? That is to say, the partner is there but not as in with all Judeo-Christian theological weight, not as the neighbor, the abyss of another person, but just as a kind of a prop to enable you to stage your fantasies. You are really with your fantasies here. In this sense, what if our standard sexuality always is structured as masturbation with a real partner? That is to say, you do not really relate to the other as other, you just use the real other as a prop to stage your to stage your fantasies. You remain within yourself. And don’t be shocked here, I’m a good guy here, very traditional. I believe in love. I’m not claiming all sex is this. I claim precisely a very simple romantic if you want thesis: in love you do reach out to the other, which is why love is not as it is usually a mistake love is not idealizing. In love you do not idealize your partner. In love is the magic moment when you are able to assume all the imperfections of your partner but nonetheless all the magic remains there. Okay, let’s not get lost in this melodramatic point, but tell you that I claim that so when people talk about post-modern, post-secular world and so on, this invention by Pranav Mistry is something which comes pretty close to it. That we have a kind of a return to pre-modernity but let’s call it technologically reconstructed pre-modernity, which again renders this fake inextricably between the universe of meaning and our perception of reality. How to break out of it? The only way I think is what in structuralism we call the differential approach. Differentiality in the sense that what matters is not only what you see but what you don’t see or don’t say. What is absent is, as Hegel would have put it, a determinate absence. It’s constitutive of what is here. To give you an example, my god, the most classical one. You know which are from Silver Blaze, one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, the best known lines from Sherlock Holmes. When Sherlock Holmes asks an inspector, "Do you remember the strange accident with the dog the last night?" The other guy says, "But the dog did nothing." "That was the strange incident," no? What does this mean? Where is ideology here? Let me give you a wonderful dialectical joke from Ernst Lubitsch’s film Ninotchka. In just a small short scene where the hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream. And it’s wonderful what the waiter replies, maybe you know it, I’m sorry. Waiter replies, "Sorry but we have run out of cream, we only have milk, so can I bring you coffee without milk, not coffee without cream?" It’s deeply true. Although you will say, but the guest gets exactly the same, no, it’s not the same thing to get coffee without milk or coffee without cream. Here okay I’m sorry, I don’t have time to go deeply into the theory of what is implied here, because why do we add cream or milk to coffee? Because coffee in itself as every commodity is not enough. You know, as they say, every commodity has to have a certain magic like no as they put it, Coke, that’s it. And that it, it’s like when you fall in love with a woman you never can say what it is, no? I mean, that’s elementary of love. If you can say I love her because of her legs, eyes, then you’re already a mental accountant. You know, like that girl has nice legs, eyes, that one has beautiful breasts, that one toes, and then you say okay this one has four or five features, this one wins, I love you, no? It doesn’t—it must be an X. And this X as a rule—I’m so sad we don’t have time to go into this—the mystery of love is that this X should be a misperception, sorry, should be a weakness, a failure, an imperfection. I remember some when were they still in my youth, my god, time passes, some twenty years ago they were the ultra-models, Cindy Crawford and Claudia Schiffer. And I read a simple stupid text about how people relate to the two of them. And the result was that a large majority would prefer to live with Cindy Crawford and when they were asked why, the answer was: you remember she had a small mole here? They say the other, too much anxiety, she is too perfect. You need you need a small imperfection. And incidentally I’m so sad we don’t have time to go into this because this is the problem with love today, if we will have time I will go a little bit more into it. In our narcissistic era, did you notice how love or fanatic sexual engagement are themselves becoming transgressive? Now you will say I’m bullshitting. Ah, let me give you a couple of examples. Did you see the last James Bond film, Quantum of Solace? Politically quite progressive. To cut a long story short, James Bond saves the Morales regime in Bolivia from some reactionary company. But did you notice something else? It’s the first James Bond where at the end you don’t have the sexual act between Bond and Bond girl. In all others you have. Now you will say this is one example. Ah, let’s go to the lowest of the lowest of the lowest, which means Dan Brown. Did you notice how in The Da Vinci Code you have Robert Langdon and the grand-grand-grand-grand-daughter of Jesus Christ? Did you notice no sex? And I even claim that this is why poor Jesus Christ himself has to be engaged in sex up there, to mask, cover up the fact that there is no sex here, you know. Like this is a very nice reading of X-Files that a friend of mine, the British Lacanian Darian Leader, proposed. You know X-Files, all the time something happening from out there aliens, why? To cover up the fact that nothing happens here between the two of them, no? All these poor aliens have to bang on our doors, no? So what I’m saying here is that okay that’s Da Vinci Code. Then one of the big candidates for the worst novel of all times, The Lost Symbol. There is not even erotic tension there, nothing. Now things become mysterious. Let’s go to Angels Demons. There is sex there in the novel between Robert Langdon and Vittoria Vetra, but not in the film. Where are we? In the good old days of manipulative capitalism, Hollywood as we say was adding sex to make things more attractive. Now Hollywood is deleting sex. I am tempted to link this to another phenomenon which my good friend Alain Badiou, he drew my attention to it. Namely he read one of this in a French daily newspaper one of this ads for for dating and marriage agencies which goes like this—it works also in English because for falling in love, tomber, we use the same word to fall—it says something very precise, it says: "We will enable you to be se trouver, to find yourself in love without the fall, sans tomber." And that’s the point. In our narcissistic—this is why we liked all these agencies and effectively I think we are gradually in a limited way but nonetheless returning to this pre-modern tradition of arranged marriages or dates, but okay it’s no longer the relatives but the specialists who do it. The idea is the following one: I mean falling in love is something terrible, let’s admit it. You have a good normal life, you you drink in the evenings with friends, maybe a one-night stand here and there, everything is perfect. Then let’s say you really passionately with all sexual passion fall in love. Your life is totally ruined, everything turns around it and so on. Which is why I read this today, I was shocked. This morning I flew from New York on United and you know United their journalist Hemispheres. I open it and it said there we are outsourcing work and so on—they forgot to add torture and so on what they are outsourcing—and then they claim isn’t it time for an active businessman or woman today to outsource love life? And it’s the same idea, like we will organize all for you. I think it’s too cheap to talk here about alienation and so on. The basic idea I claim is that we more and more fear this very openness exposure to the other. You know this moment of vulnerability which, let’s be brutal as you Walter kindly mentioned this class struggle versus multiculturalism, no, this moment which I detect in the topic of harassment. Harassment is I think one of ideological categories today. I don’t mean this in any ominous Stalinist sense. I mean ideology in the sense that you take a problem which is a real problem, but the way you formulate a problem mystifies it. Like harassment, of course it describes a very real problem and I’m totally for harsh punishment whatever you want, sexism, racism and so on. But unfortunately harassment tends to mean something more. It’s even its opposite I claim, namely ask yourself the Wittgensteinian question, not what does it mean but how does it work in our language games and so on. Isn’t it that we tend to use the word harassment when in whatever way the other as a desiring being becomes too intrusive, comes too close to us? For example, a typical French, I know better the situation here in France, racist today is a liberal, he would never admit he is a racist. He would say oh I love blacks, their music beautiful, but. And then comes the but. Usually in France they say I don’t like the smell of their food, I find this intrusive. Or it can be I think the classical topic on which Spike Lee played nicely in his how should I call his early movie Do the Right Thing: it’s music, no? Blacks are okay but in these boomboxes their music annoys me and so on, or the way they smell, the way they laugh and so on and so on. And again what makes me afraid in this topic of harassment is that hidden in it is the opposite of what it wants to be. Don’t harass me means don’t come too close to me. So in so far as we read tolerance as no harassment, it means precisely I don’t tolerate your over-proximity. Okay, but back to coffee where we began. So we have this coffee and it’s always missing the key ingredient, the mystical one, it’s like you know in a woman that something which makes you fall in love. And I claim that this is why we add things to coffee because coffee is not coffee in itself. It’s a little bit like at some point in California it was even prohibited to import them, they had to be smuggled from Canada, namely do you remember, now you can get them I hope, so-called Kinder Surprise egg? You know, just an empty eggshell like like egg and then within a small plastic toy. I like this because it’s a kind of a metaphor for perfect commodity. It’s a commodity chocolate, but it’s as if they are telling you: "We know what’s your dream, in commodity there is something more, well, here you have it this stupid plastic toy, here you have it." The true mystery of commodity I claim is what—now you will tell me of course but but what about those purists who like coffee, just plain coffee? Ah, coffee can be its own supplement. How? If you know the history of cinema there is a wonderful example from Andre Bazin, the French great theorist of cinema, who said you know in the late 40s Western, the movie the movie genre found itself more and more in crisis. And as you probably know the first reaction was to combine it with another genre to obfuscate this crisis, like you know Seven Brides for Seven Brothers whatever it’s Western with musical. Then even a very good one like Raoul Walsh's Pursued with Robert Mitchum, Western with film noir. Then the problem comes what about two films a couple of years later, mid-50s, two mega-Westerns: Shane and High Noon. Andre Bazin proposed a wonderful theory. These are meta-Westerns, they are Westerns but where this meta-dimension is Western itself. It’s a Western which as it were relates to itself as its own higher level norm. So let me go on. What am I aiming here with this negation and so on, like negation inscribed into the very identity? I can give you another wonderful erotic I claim example—don’t be afraid, very modest. It’s from the old English working-class drama Brassed Off with Ewan McGregor before he became Jedi when he was still a working-class hero. There is in the middle of the film a wonderful scene where the hero accompanies a young pretty woman home, they are flirting, then at the entrance she tells him: "Would you like to come up to my flat for a coffee?" He answers: "Yes gladly but there is a problem, I don’t drink coffee." Her answer with a smile: "No problem, I don’t have any." You see, nothing is said, just something is offered and then taken back. But the result is not zero, the result is an almost embarrassing obscene invitation to sex. Why lose time with this type of jokes? Because I claim they offer maybe one of the keys as to how ideology functions in our allegedly post-ideological times. Today ideology is not so much in what is directly said but you must locate let’s call it the determinate absence. What is not said but implied. You must find—you are getting coffee, ideological coffee, but the true question is am I getting coffee without milk or without cream, no? What is there? For example, there is already I cannot restrain from doing it because I think that one of the great spiritual catastrophes implied by the fall of communist regimes is the disappearance of wonderfully refined sometimes political jokes, no? Exactly the same paradox, you find it in a well-known joke from socialist Poland where you know things were always unavailable usually in the stores. So a guy enters a store and asks: "You probably don’t have butter, no?" The answer: "Sorry, no no you are—we are the store which doesn’t have toilet paper, not butter. The other store there is the one which doesn’t have butter," and so on, no? So again it’s always this question. You know in Brazil they told me we are a wonderful nation, when there is a carnival all people dance together. Yeah, I told them, but you know, there is a poor worker who goes to carnival and dances there just to forget that he cannot properly provide for his family and there is a rich guy who goes there to dance so that he feels one with the people or whatever, no? Like you know what I mean, one is dancing without milk, the other one is dancing without cream. Or to put it yet in another way, let’s take again this Brassed Off example. I think we can well imagine a similar dialogue where the charming seductive girl is Dick Cheney from late when United States were preparing the invasion of Iraq. Let’s say Cheney went to Europe to convince Europeans to join them in attacking Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction. European replies trying to squeeze out, no? "But you are better equipped, we don’t have proper facilities to search for weapons of mass destruction." And probably Dick Cheney answered something like, "No problem, there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq." You know what I mean by this, that let’s be clear, I’m not saying here I support Julian Assange, but in a very specific way. What he did is not simply to bring everything out from the most personal level to international level of interstate relations. No no, one has to be refined, you cannot simply say everything. It’s an obscenity already at the interpersonal level. Even Kant, who is the philosopher who is the fanatic of say everything, never lie, concedes that there are situations where you are obliged to lie. And he in a very nice way gives as an example, for example you have a friend who is mortally ill of cancer, no? You will not tell him "Oh my god you look like shit when will you drop down." You will tell him of course "Oh you look a little bit better, I’m so glad to see you" whatever, no? So the point is what? That when you say something like this, a lie or not saying everything, the problem is in what do you imply. Here I think we should refer to a again wonderful scene from a Marx Brothers movie which is otherwise not so good, one of the late ones, Go West. Where at the very beginning if you remember Groucho Marx enters a train station and there at the how do you call it office whatever wants to buy a ticket. And then he gives to the selling person there a whole bunch of dollar notes and says "It’s okay, don’t count it" and so on, no? The guy nonetheless counts them and says "But it’s not enough." And Groucho says "Well I told you not to count it," no and so on. You see, he said don’t count it but with the implication "Don’t bother everything is okay," no? Can’t we again use the unfortunate Dick Cheney and claim that you know, he said in an interview I forgot to which public medium that let’s be frank—he was of course referring to torture and so on—let’s be frank, to really fight the war on terror some things has to be done discretely, let’s not talk about it, something like that, no? But then we discovered what was included. We thought okay, a little bit of hard pressure and so on, no? But then we discovered that there were many other things included in this like him privileging Halliburton and other companies and so on. And we can well imagine him telling us "Okay okay some things have to be done discretely, let’s not look into them," then we would tell him "But wait a minute we have here your own private interests Halliburton" and he would say "But I told you we shouldn’t talk about it" and so on. You see this type of gap is crucial in today’s ideology. Maybe the crucial dimension is not the lying, is not so much lying about what you say, but lying about the implications. You manipulate at the level of generating the wrong implications. Permit me another example from cinema that I often like to use, maybe already know it I’m sorry again, one of the true I claim masterpieces of Hollywood left, John Carpenter’s They Live. A very naive from it’s a wonderfully naive story of an unemployed guy called John Nada—Nada nothing in Spanish, so proletarian whatever you want—homeless, jobless, wanders around LA and enters an abandoned church and finds there some glasses. Some glasses, mysterious. Then he walks around the city, puts them on and discovers that these are literally critique of ideology glasses, like you put them on and you see the true message. For example, he sees a big poster: Go to Hawaii, have the holiday of your lifetime and so on. He puts the glasses on and it says: Enjoy stupid enjoyment, don’t think and so on, like the true message. Now you will say this is simplistic, stupid. Ah, it’s not so stupid, I will immediately tell you why the movie is nonetheless more intelligent than it may appear. The first thing I like is that to see the truth, the true message, you have to put glasses on. This is already a good beginning because our common sense would have tell tell us when we don’t see things clearly we have some glasses which distort, you have to do is to take the glasses off and see things the way they are. No no no, you need glasses, which means to put it sorry in half Stalinist terms, you need education. Truth doesn't come spontaneously. I think we have to accept this pessimistic message, which is why in a wonderfully ambiguous scene of the film, when the hero tries to bring his best friend to put the glasses on, the friend resists and there is a very strange fight which goes on for ten minutes. I mean it functions precisely this difficult message that freedom doesn't come for free. Another thing that I like here is that the movie turns around the standard ideological gap. In the standard ideological gap it's the true message ideological that you get directly and as it were what you see implicitly, for what you have to put the glasses on to see it directly, what is only implied is precisely the ideological enjoyment, that which with which ideology bribes you, as it were, no? So I’ve written three books celebrating Christianity so don't take this wrong, but nonetheless I have just some problems with this Catholic pedophilia, the shameless way they treat it. And I would say let me imagine in the same way you see a poster "Dedicate your life to God, become a priest." Then what would you have seen putting on glasses? "And you can have the small boys if you do it discretely," and so on. Or let me do it a more brutal racist example. Imagine of course they didn't function like that but imagine we are in the 20s in the south of the United States, Ku Klux Klan and so on. Okay, you see a poster like "Defend our Christian way of life" and so on whatever. You put the glasses on and you read "And if you do this next weekend we can go and lynch some blacks and rape some black girls" or whatever. I mean this is an extreme—I don’t have time to go into it—but this is an extremely important lecture I think, which already was understood by Theodor Adorno of Frankfurt School and by others, that totalitarianism is not simply terror, renunciation. It always also bribes you with some kind of a false transgression. Like this was a wonderful discovery from me when I learned that Mikhail Bakhtin, maybe you heard about him, he is the Russian fellow traveler of the of formalists who in his book from mid-30s, the work of Francois Rabelais, celebrated this carnival culture, you know, the magic moment when explicit rules are suspended, beggar is king, king is beggar, and all my leftist friends are ecstatic, oh my god it's like utopia. Unfortunately a friend of mine, a Russian theorist of art Boris Groys, told me that now they discovered the archives of Mikhail Bakhtin who was exiled to Kazan, a small city well, and it's absolutely clear that far from celebrating carnival, his book on Rabelais it's a kind of a coded theory of Stalinist purges. The real carnival were the Stalinist purges where precisely today you are the king, member of Politburo, tomorrow you are in Gulag the English spy traitor or whatever, no? And all of Stalinism played wonderfully with this coded way, wonderfully in a terrified way. For example, my favorite story of this codification is that Molotov, at some point the second third guy after Stalin, got into total panic at some point. How? You know when there were the big political trials, the it was very important to read closely what the accused were accused of, because you get this is the Kremlinological symbology math-bology, much more interesting than Robert Langdon, no? Because many things you can learn. For example, when there was the I don't know the trial against whom, I think this was already late Stalin, the Jewish plot so-called, no? The idea was that the doctors were part of the imperialist plot to kill Soviet leaders. And they were enumerated them: Stalin, Molotov and so on and so on. Then a week later Pravda wrote that now the investigation came to new results and again this list of victims, the ones who whom the plotters tried to kill, was printed, and Molotov got into a panic because his name was not there. This meant he is not in, you know, because his name was not—I mean it's a crazy universe I admit it. So let me go on not to lose time. So again what I find interesting in this glasses theory is that it doesn't follow this traditional way where again you get explicitly the direct ideological call "Sacrifice yourself whatever," and with glasses on you see the obscenity—small boys, raping blacks whatever—that you get. It's the other way round. The direct message is the obscenity, pleasure, whatever. The implicit message is the injunction which which sustains it. And I think that this brings me back to the beginning. It would be very interesting I claim maybe to just imagine when you are not sure about certain humanitarian ad or whatever, imagine you putting glasses on and imagine what can one read there. For example, my classical example, you see an ad with the disgusting manipulation, the the disfigured face of a black young boy and then the message something like: "For the price of a couple of cappuccinos you can make a difference, you can save his life." Okay fine, let's put the glasses on. Isn't it something we know there is big injustice in the world, but for a price of a couple of cappuccinos you can not only not care about it but even feel good that you really did something or whatever. That's the whole point I claim. It's the same as with—now I will be very brutal you will not like it probably—let's take all this ecological bullshit. No, I again, ecology is the problem today. But what is bullshit is how it is ideologically rephrased through this lifestyle ecology, you know, trying to make you feel guilty—did you recycle that can of Coke and so on? Which is or let's go even further. Let's take organic apples. You buy them, I also do, but do you ever ask yourself why do you buy them? I claim that the majority of us don't really believe that they are any better than those beautiful genetically manipulated apples. It's more that we're buying ideology for by paying more. It makes us feel good, isn't it wonderful? Even when I buy apples, I'm part of a big project to save the mother earth, I'm doing something and so on and so on. It's a wonderful way of pseudo-activity. You know, pseudo-activity in this sense was my friend Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller drew attention to these paradoxes of magical thinking today. You know how the most stupid example: you sit at home at TV, you watch your favorite basketball, baseball, whatever club, and you shout there, "Oh go on go on!" Of course you don’t believe it, but nonetheless you act as if your shouting can magically influence the game. I claim when you buy organic apples you do something quite similar to this frankly, no? I mean again I’m not saying we shouldn’t do it, I’m saying let’s just be aware that when we are doing it, we are also doing it to forget about what is really to be done. And again, I’m sorry if I repeat an old example but I like to repeat it. Here the ultra-example is Starbucks. I think they should be awarded a kind of a Nobel Prize, not for economy but for for for literature or if there would be Nobel Nobel Prize for thought or what. You know why? Because they did something quite ingenious. In the dark old days of ordinary capitalism we were consumerists, then we felt bad for being consumerists and you had to do something against it, no? Whatever. Dedicate your life to big humanitarian causes, do something whatever. But at least there was a gap. What is Starbucks doing? I love them. I love them which means I would bomb them but cannot, no? You remember all the posters you get when you enter a Starbucks coffee house, no? Like our basically the message is, our cappuccino is more expensive, true, than with the others but percent goes to Guatemala children, the other to I don’t know bring war to bring water sorry to the desert whatever. Isn’t this a wonderful thing? The message is you don’t have to stop being a consumerist because the price of redemption, anti-consumerist price for solidarity, we include it in the price of a commodity, you know. So it’s included, you can go on and you can feel well and so on and so on. Okay, so now we have a problem. The problem is—oh my god I will kill myself—okay, I okay now I will do something, don’t be in a panic, I will stop shortly. What I only want to do is to play this game: let’s say it’s the end and the debate begins and I ask myself a question, what did you want to say in the remaining part of your talk? I will be brief. Okay. First, unfortunately I didn’t have time, I wanted really to develop just an idea of what is going on today. The basic idea was already proposed by some economists that the role of being unemployed is changing today radically. It’s not just the old Marxist notion of reserve army of labor, the system is more than ever systematically producing large number of people who all of a sudden became basically for life unemployable. Or even worse, the big crisis in Europe with students, they are educated but it’s in advance clear there will be no job for them, so that we have radically to expand change the notion of exploitation. Connected this I wanted to develop how I don’t like with all the discourse analysis and so on the notion of you know how we always like to focus on domination, how we are dominated, regulated and so on. I claim that domination without exploitation becomes something all too ideological, it obfuscates the basic capitalist paradox and so on. So then I wanted to do something which I hope that you—I don’t know why—I felt that it should be Stanley in your spirit, no? To show up how to obfuscate all this stuff ideology functions. For example, my one of the guys that I really like, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, the French theorist of catastrophe and so on, has shown how contingency and injustice of capitalism—this is how ideology works at its best, best I mean most efficient—far from being an obstacle to the functioning of capitalism is what makes capitalism palpable. And he gives this very simple example of for example injustice. I work hard, you were lazy but because of some irrational unexpected market movements I go bankrupt, you succeed. This is what makes capitalism tolerable from what point? From the point of resentment and envy. Because in this way I can retain my fake dignity. I can tell to myself, "Oh that guy is a jerk blah blah but that’s capitalism, it’s all contingent and so on." It would have been much more difficult and dangerous to have a society where the success of people would have been really determined by their actual achievements, merits, and so on. Because if then you are a loser, then you are really a loser. No way to claim you know, it’s—it would lead to much harsher which is why I’m deeply suspicious of the idea of intolerance. I don’t know why I associated this idea with your in good sense evil spirits, you know, sorry. The next thing I wanted to develop against the same line is that I’m sick and tired of this religious idea even on Wall Street you can see it: "Oh, against greed and so on." Don’t blame it on psychology. If anything, capitalism at its purest, it’s not a point of egotism and so on. True evil is not egotism. Here I wanted to develop a wonderful theory of Rousseau where he says that egotism is not evil. It’s very easy in contrast to what theologians are saying to pass from your egotist concern to the common good. With a little bit of reasoning you get it. Evil begins when—and this is the famous Rousseau distinction between amour de soi, love of the self which is natural, and amour-propre, the perverted preferring of oneself to others. Amour-propre is not simply I want my own profit but you know as they say about capitalism it's not enough for me to win, the other has to lose. And that matters more than me winning. The logic is the one which is maybe constitutive of my nation, because one of the proverbial attitudes of a Slovene farmer is you know, a fairy comes to him and tells him: "Would you like for me to give you a cow for free, but I warn you warn you I will give to your neighbor two cows." He said: "No, rather kill one of my cows but kill two of the neighbor," you know, like the all this. In other words, my point was that we cannot criticize capitalism in the sense of oh it's greed. No, capitalism, Walter Benjamin—there are other Walters unfortunately—was right, capitalism has the structure, it’s a perverted religious ethics. Capitalism says expansion, self-reproduction of the capital must go on no matter what the utilitarian human costs and so on and so on. So you don’t need any any mega-ethics, you can criticize capitalism precisely from a simple utilitarian standpoint and so on. Which now brings me to my conclusion. Now that we live in this times of turmoil and so on, what would have been—I don’t have the right to give any advice—but nonetheless I will do it, no? Precisely the first attitude would be: don’t blame people and their attitudes. The problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system which pushes you to be corrupt. I’m here a kind of a Brechtian—not cynic but—you know Bertolt Brecht, I don’t like him too much, but at some point what I like in him is this implicit very Protestant theology which emphasizes the fall of man. His idea is you can't change man, man is by nature evil and so on. And there is a wonderful dialogue of those Herr Keuner, Mr. Keuner stories, where a guy says: "People are manipulated by media, by newspapers, we have to change people so that they will not fall for this manipulation." And Herr Keuner, Mr. Keuner, the good guy Brechtian hero says: "No, people are the way they are, you can only change newspapers." That’s history: change newspapers not people, no? The same goes here. The second thing that I think should be emphasized is that this moment here is a dangerous one. You know my old joke how the system is offering us more and more a product without its without its dangerous ingredients: coffee without caffeine, ice cream without fat, beer without alcohol and so on. The danger is that this protest will also turn into a—and incidentally that’s my problem with multiculturalism, the official one—the other it celebrates is a decaffeinated other, this shitty other with holistic attitudes and so on. My cure against it was years ago when I was in Missoula, Montana, I encountered an Native American, Indian. He gave me the lesson of a lifetime. First he said, "I hate the name Native Americans. What does it mean? You are cultural Americans, we are native or what?" And he told me, "I prefer to be called Indian." You know what he gave me as the reason? He said, "Because at least then my name is a monument to the stupidity of white men, you know, who thought they are, you know." Then he said, "I hate this patronizing attitude, you know, oh you have the holistic attitude towards nature," and he told me, "I can give you books which demonstrate that we have burned more forests and killed more buffaloes than you ever will do, white men," and so on. This is true anti-racism, not that patronizing idealization. So again, what I'm saying is that at this point we should resist—they're easy to resist direct enemies who say you know, oh lazy guys who do nothing, they destroy property, American values. To them it’s I claim pretty easy to answer. Like property, my god, I already said this on Wall Street maybe you know it, when demonstrators are reproached for destroying private property: listen, the the crisis, if by property we mean what even Tea Party people mean, not some financial speculations but real hard-working people earning their houses, then destroyed more private property than all the left united if we were just destroying property and so on. So the other thing that, you know, we’re in what sense in a fragile moment. And here I’m not bullshitting, I’m precisely not saying "Oh, the first moment of a communist revolution," I’m not crazy, I mean. Communism in the in the 20th-century sense is over, it was a catastrophe. Even I’m claiming that the only thing that remains of communism are the problems, problems of commons, nature and so on. Communists are well and alive today, they are willing they are today as you know when they are in power the most efficient capitalists, no? When I was in China I read a wonderful commentary where they say forty years ago Deng Xiaoping thought only capitalism can save China, now in a crisis we behave as if only China can save capitalism, no? And there is a very serious problem here which is that the marriage between capitalism and democracy seems to be over. What is really emerging in China, Singapore, and spreading around is a capitalism more efficient, dynamic, productive, destructive than ours, but which fits perfectly an authoritarian regime. So what I’m saying is that what I like about these protests is the fact that a certain taboo is broken. To go back to my beginning, it’s no longer just we have to get rid of corrupted people or whatever. It’s allowed to think that there is maybe something wrong with the system as such. But that’s it, let’s be clear, we, at least we don’t have the answers. Which is why we should absolutely resist that kind of a blackmail which I call clinching blackmail. You know what is clinching in boxing, I think? You don’t want to be beaten so you embrace the enemy. The biggest practitioner of clinching is I think Bill Clinton. You know, here is his reaction to Wall Street. He said protests are on balance a positive thing, but he said, I quote him, "They, protesters, need to be for something specific, not just against something because if you are just against something someone else will fill the vacuum you create." So then he said support Obama’s plan for concrete measures. But I claim this precisely is what we should resist today. Not because there are some ominous plans to destroy the system. A certain dissatisfaction emerged. And let’s use it as, as it were, zero-level starting point to start thinking, where no one has the privilege to pretend to have any answers. I am absolutely not saying that we intellectuals know although it's incredible what a demand there is on this. I mean, there are people as you probably know better than me who don't take me seriously, but nonetheless I got many messages where people told me "Professor, could you write us a precise program, what should we do next week?" I don't know. I mean, so we intellectuals don't know, those who have programs are bluffing or are like Clinton—and I'm not saying he is immoral, he just, what does it mean what he says? You know if you are a woman, you know how this works when you are in so-called which are I think very subversive thing hysterical outbursts. You do hysterical outbursts and then a man says: "But what do you want really?" This "what do you want" is very oppressive. It really means compelling you to translate your rage or whatever into the form of a demand which is already part of the hegemonic system and so on and so on. So I think that precisely we should resist this. We should simply start thinking without illusions. We don’t know but also we should avoid this kind of a pseudo-Maoist fascination, "trust the people they know." No, people also don't know. Nobody knows. We don't know, people don't know. We maybe know what's the problem and here the metaphor I like is that of Claude Levi-Strauss who says said something wonderful about the prohibition of incest, that it's not a problem but an answer to a question that we don't know what's the question. And maybe this would maybe be the formula of what we should do. We should look at the protests as reactions, answers to a question which we should formulate maybe. We cannot provide answers, maybe we can ask the right questions. And through this interaction something may emerge. Why? Because to conclude, just the last lines—they are maybe even known to some of you I’ve already published them—you know, the immediate reply would have been, "But are you dreaming? Is the change possible and so on?" Ah, what is possible, what is impossible today, you may have noticed, it is an extremely ideologically invested matter. Did you notice how on the one hand, concerning technology and private pleasures, more and more everything is possible, no? Like, you know, the media are telling us what—my god, I read on the 10th of October in Pittsburgh, it's pretty terrifying, did you read it? It's the first time that the guy, a crippled guy, already learned how to move his hand just by the power of his thoughts. They implanted some some stuff here which is not even invasive, penetrative, but just reads the signals and after practicing for months he can move objects just by thinking about it. Now this is nice but it has its dangers, because our most elementary sense of freedom is "my thinking is here, reality is out there." What happens with our subjectivity and so on? I'm not a catastrophist, I'm just saying we have to think. There are problems today, ecology, biogenetics and so on, we have to start thinking. The only way in which I am a communist if you want, is only in the sense that the problems we are dealing it are the problems of commons: ecology, our commons, biogenetics, our commons and so on. I'm not saying "Oh, return to Leninist party," which is ridiculous. But what I want to say is that okay, in the domain of technology and then through through cloning we can become practically immortal, always new organs, all this goes, and all the obscenities that I like to tell here like—I was told I cannot resist saying it—in New York there is now a surgeon who specializes in cutting a penis into two. You can do it with two whatever. Okay, all this is possible. But did you notice how then but when you say "Let's spend half a percent more money for health care," impossible! We will become incompetent, whatever, and so on. This is the sad thing for me how we can imagine the end of the world being hit by an asteroid or whatever, we cannot imagine spending a little bit more on health care or whatever, no? Here and it's not a priori impossible. Are we aware to what extent even today's capitalism functions on certain ideological prejudices? For example, recently I was in Norway and friends told me that there—and it's not any socialist terror of social-democratic government, it's simply part of their social pact, shared national consensus—that in an average private also company, the gap between the lowest paid cleaning man or lady and the top CEO is to maximum to And again it's not some state regulation, it's simply people somehow accept it. So what I'm saying is that this is the problem as again Fred put it nicely: we can imagine the end of the world, we cannot imagine a small change in capitalism. So really now the conclusion. In mid-April of this year something wonderful happened in China. I love these accidents. The government issued—it's not a joke, I checked it with my friends there because it sounded too crazy to be true but it is—the government issued a regulation prohibiting in all narrative media—that is to say cinema, TV, TV stories, comics, novels—all topics concerning alternate reality and time travel. The official explanation was that it’s too serious a matter, history, the great history of Chinese people, to be left to such stupid play. Of course, the fear is: it’s not good to allow the people to even imagine alternate possibilities. But I think this is a good sign for China. You know why? Because at least people still obviously imagine it, so they need censorship. The tragedy of us is that we don’t even need this censorship, we already cannot imagine it. So maybe, maybe this is the stuff of us intellectuals. We are not magicians, we don’t know what to do, my god. But what we can do is just to use all these demonstrations etc. to as it were open up the space for thinking, to widen the scope of what is considered possible or even what is considered impossible. Because I hope you Stanley would also like, we both share a certain—now we will both be linked for this—dogmatic Stalinist spirit. What do I mean by this? For example when people say "Democracy blah blah," no, in certain things I like total dogmatism. Where? Let's take rape. I wouldn't like to live in a society where you freely debate rape. No, sorry to tell you, I would like to live in a society where the idea that rape is something horrible, inadmissible, is totally dogmatically accepted so that it's not even a matter of debate. If somebody advocates rape, you don't have to—you know, if you debate it, you already make the Reagan mistake. You know what I mean by Reagan mistake? Reagan, this was a wonderful moment thirty years ago, twenty ago, I remember President Reagan was once accused that he is close to those some people who advocate who deny the Holocaust, no? And his defense was a legendary one. It was "No it's not true, whenever at my dinner someone denies Holocaust, I always fight him." Of course the question is what kind of friends does he have that he has all the time to to to defend that there was a Holocaust? So what I’m saying is that at this level of what is considered possible, impossible, maybe it's our duty to change. Like maybe we will not be at least not in this easy way immortal, but maybe we can change social regulations a little bit, no? Because you know, again to conclude with my standard line: remember, the true utopia is not to change things. Unfortunately the true utopia is that the way they are, things can go on indefinitely. This is the true utopia. Which is why we who without any communist dreams, new party or whatever, we who just want to open up the space of questioning a little bit, we are the true anti-utopians. I'm sorry if I was too long, but at least you maybe understand now why my friends call me Fidel. Not because of politics, but you know, Fidel comes, comrades, just ten minutes of remark, and then if he is very tired it's three hours, no? Thanks very much for your patience. Thank you. Slavoj didn’t actually give me a question, planted a question, but I'm not—it was only to be used if no one else had questions. I'm up here just to say there are microphones on either side of the room. And what we thought we’d do is just have people line up at the microphone and then go back and forth from one to the other. Um, so I’m going to wait for a second to give people a chance to get to the microphone. Um, and if no one is at the microphone, then I will have to ask the extremely obscene question, um, that I was planted with, and I won’t do it, so just give it a second. I don't know what game are you playing now? I’m not—I’m not playing—here. Where? No, I don't, I don't—here. Let's— But you are bluffing and you don’t even have the question probably. Just please, yes. It was about a dog. Just I hope it works with sound. So you just go there and there and I'll let you— No, but the mic? I hope it works, no? No it doesn't—okay, it does, perfect. Thank you. Um, one of the premises of critical thinking of course is reflexivity, and it’s the awareness of the conditions of possibility of. And when you talk about this incredibly charming and of course I’m enthusiastic about it in a more in a political sense than in an epistemological one, this idea of putting the lenses and kind of seeing the truth. I mean there’s a fiction of transparency that we as intellectuals are able to unveil the reality. But of course we have to be aware of our own standpoint when we do that. So I don’t know, I’m very curious about that idea of the sort of standpoint—we don’t have the questions, which I think is something that I appreciated listening to you saying that at the last part—but this idea that there’s a move of unveiling and there’s an assumption that there’s some hidden truth out there that we’re going to be able to find. And how do you reconcile that as a standpoint of being an intellectual with the reflexivity of actually being aware of the own conditions and very relative conditions. It's a wonderful question. Again, the only problem is that it’s as you admitted it’s a one-hour answer question. Okay, very briefly. Very briefly. My answer would have been that the truth to which we do have access is not a positive truth in the sense of I magically step out of myself and see the things the way they really are. What we can see is the inherent untruth of what is going on. What do I mean by this? A wonderful example that I really liked. For example, Jacques Lacan says somewhere something which has a male-chauvinist twist, I don't like that, but if you take the form of it it's wonderfully true. He says let's take a husband who is pathologically jealous about his wife sleeping with other men. And he says even if all his suspicions are true, the wife is really doing it, his jealousy is
Thanks very much. I am really glad to be here. My gratitude to all of you here who helped to introduce me, and I noticed that there were three before I—I consider it beneath dignity if only one guy introduced me. There must be a guy introducing a guy introducing... No but seriously, I’m especially glad to be here because of—because of you Stanley, because you know how I intellectually fell in love with you. Didn’t you write a book years ago, I think it was a book or a text, something like "Why There Ain’t Such a Thing Like Freedom of the Speech and Why It’s Good That There Ain't"? How can—you know, like, this is rare today. Even a guy that most of us definitely doesn’t like, like George Bush, the younger the president. But my god, when he did that wonderful slip of tongue, you remember? "I think I was misunderstandestimated." How can you not love him for a brief second? The second more serious reason that I really like Stanley is for—wasn’t it you gave an interview and you were asked when you were involved in all those polemics, affirmative action and so on, but what are you? And you said much more modestly, "I am a Milton scholar, Miltonist" or what, no? Listen, this is what we should stick to today. Don’t be blackmailed by this idea which may appear a leftist idea, but it’s really the speech of those in power today, that if you are doing just abstract humanities whatever studies, they like to make you feel guilty, like, you know, like, you know all this disgustingly manipulative line of thought like, you can just study Milton or whoever here while—and then you have a list—while children are starving in Somalia or whatever. No, this you know why—this is an obscenity which shows all that is false in this charity capitalism. You know, because I remember when I was young, it’s true leftists were saying, you live in an ivory tower while people are starving. But it gave me an idea that something is wrong with this when I remember some a couple of years ago Bill Gates started to talk like that. What does it mean all the Microsoft programs when people are dying of illnesses? And then I got it what it really means when he went on: so let’s forget our ideological boring struggles, capitalism, socialism, let’s just all get together and do something. In other words, you see unfortunately the children, starving children of Somalia, not to help them, but the order is: give the stupid ten dollars to help them and stop thinking. And a true leftist doesn’t—although, sorry, I don’t mean it personally that I’m not stigma—but it’s not like that. I hope Stanley that at least we agree on one thing. The Marx that maybe we both like is you know which one? In or okay, it wasn’t really the possibility of a revolution, but like it appeared to some guys maybe there will be a revolution. And then there is a unique letter from Marx to Engels which expresses Marx’s deep worry like, "What are these these guys doing? They want revolution now, I haven’t yet finished Capital, you know, what are they..." I mean, that’s the attitude. And all great guys are doing this. The world was in turmoil what did Lenin do? He went to Switzerland and started reading Hegel’s Logic and so on. I mean, don’t, don’t, don’t concede to this cheap blackmail which is really a new form to prohibit thinking. If you play this game of how can you spend money here when what I mean—no, you this is the new language of power today. So this is why I really feel here solidarity with you. And for another reason I feel solidarity, because even when—take this as a friendly gesture—even when maybe if ever I take power and if you are still alive, maybe you will have to take a special one-way train to Siberia or whatever you call it, no? But still where you are at the best is, you know, today we don’t need these well well-meaning liberals who always like paint to you some light at the end of the tunnel, things better. What is most needed today is just an honest description of a deadlock that we are in. As already the old Frankfurt School guy Max Horkheimer said once and Adorno repeated it: "Pessimism in theory, optimism in practice." We don’t need optimism in theory, cheap one. This is why, to provoke you, when somebody asked me recently okay, what is good what is bad in Hollywood today? I told him what I really hate is this feel-good so-called Hollywood Marxism, you know, like Pelican Brief, All the President’s Men. It may appear very critical. My god, the president himself was corrupted together with some big company. But why do these films make us feel so good? Because you know, the ultimate message is so comfortable: My god, what a great country we live in where two ordinary guys can overthrow the mightiest man in the universe. And my provocation was, I’m sorry to tell you, I prefer to this cheap liberalism. I’m talking very seriously about the last season—I didn’t see it all, I don’t have time—but the end. You remember what happened there? Jack Bauer is no longer this kind of a Himmler style guy who is you know this right-wing hero where the idea is as Himmler put it, everyone can be a hero in the sense of doing good things for his nation, a true hero is the one who is ready to dirty his hands, to torture, to do horrible things. But towards the end he is no longer that, he gets totally desperate, he says everything must come open, I cannot live with it. And his positive opposite Allison Taylor, the more liberal president, also gets entangled in a deadlock, has to step down. So what I like is that there is no, as we put it, bullshitting. The the series ends up with a radical deadlock. Within present coordinates it simply practically impossible to find an ethical position. Isn’t this a much more sobering lecture than you know that feel-good liberalism and so on and so on? That’s the spirit we need today. Don’t go into this blackmail like you will bring us you are bringing us only the bad news. No, the good—the good news are I claim, I hope we again agree here Stanley, the good news should be like things like dignity or whatever which are so-called they are necessary necessary by-products. If you directly aim at them it’s counter-productive. You know if you try to act with dignity it’s ridiculous. It must emerge spontaneously from... So I claim that if there is a hope today, it can only emerge as a necessary by-product of our pessimistic analysis. It’s not that you paint it directly. So okay, after this stuff let’s go to work. Okay. I would like to begin with a wonderful quote from my maybe known to some of you I’m sorry of my preferred theologian G.K. Chesterton, who in his novel The Man Who Was Thursday ironically proposed to install a quote "Special corps of policemen, policemen who are also philosophers." Here is a quote from Chesterton: "The work of the philosophical policeman is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to coffee houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a diary that a crime has been committed; we discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed," and so on and so on. This may appear ridiculous but would thinkers as different as Karl Popper, Theodor Adorno, Emmanuel Levinas not subscribe to a slightly changed version of this idea, where actual political crime is called totalitarianism and the philosophical crime is condensed in the notion of totality? A straight road leads from the philosophy’s philosophical notion of totality to political totalitarianism, so these guys claim. And so the task of political, sorry, philosophical police is to discover from a book of Plato’s dialogues or a treatise on social contract by Rousseau that a political crime like Gulag whatever will be committed, as we said it when I was young from Plato to NATO line. The ordinary political policeman goes to secret organizations to arrest revolutionaries; the philosophical policeman goes to philosophical symposia to detect proponents of totality, and so on and so on. It’s a nice provocative idea, this idea by Chesterton, but I think at one crucial point he is nonetheless wrong. We philosophers, at our best at least, when we are truly philosophers, we don’t try to destroy the system. We just observe and bring out signs, features which demonstrate that the system is undermining its own premises, undercutting itself. This is why permit me a brief detour through Hegel. This is why I like Hegel’s notion of totality. It has nothing to do in Hegel this notion with this kind of a theological large encompassing sorry encompassing unity. You know, like this may appear to you something horrible but if you look from it all, oh it’s just part of the divine harmony and so on. No, for Hegel to locate a phenomenon into its totality does not mean to see the hidden harmony of the whole, but to include into a system all its distortions, antagonisms, inconsistencies and so on and so on. This is for Hegel totality. For example, to make a quick jump to today’s global politics, to observe capitalism as a totality doesn’t mean that I should be telling you some nice fables about global market bringing peace, prosperity, democracy, but to include into capitalism also phenomena for example like Congo. Take Congo which is probably the hell on earth today, a country where according to Time magazine report a couple of years ago five million people died in the last years for unnatural reasons, a state which even doesn’t function as a state. Look at it closely and you will see it’s not some kind of Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness out of our civilization; as such it’s fully included in global capitalism. Most of the metals, some I mean most some component components of our computers which make them workable come from Congo and so on and so on. So to put it in more philosophical terms, thinking begins for Hegel when the distortion of a notion—like you have a certain notion capitalism, democracy, and things are not well so you say no they didn’t apply it correctly it’s a distortion—the distortion of a notion becomes a distortion constitutive of this notion itself. You demonstrate how something which appears to be just a result of misapplication, incomplete realization of a project, is a necessary constituent of this project. Again back to Congo, the point is to demonstrate that it’s not that some of us here in Scandinavia are happy to live in highly developed capitalism, others slowly will approach it. No, the point is that we here Scandinavia and Congo, we are all parts of the same of the same totality. What does this mean, this brief methodological introduction? How can we disengage or rather step acquire a minimal distance towards ideology today? Because we are being told repeatedly ideology no longer exists and so on and so on. To give you a good example of how ideology and technology can be deeply, almost inextricably mixed with each other, I would like to recall to you—maybe you’ve heard about it—a strange invention which was developed by Pranav Mistry, an Indian who works at MIT Media Lab. He developed a wearable that you can wear, gestural interface again called SixthSense two years ago, I think. Allegedly it works; I saw the presentation on TV and so on. What happens here? All you need is—the hardware you need is a small webcam which hangs from your neck, a pocket projector and a mirror, all connected wirelessly to a smartphone in your pocket. That’s all you need. The way it works is that you as the user, you begin to handle objects and making gestures. The camera recognizes and tracks your hand gestures and the physical objects using computer vision-based techniques. Then the software processes the video stream data, reading it as a series of instructions and it retrieves the appropriate information—texts, images, and so on—from the internet. The device then projects this information onto any physical surface which is available there—walls, physical objects, whatever. What does this mean? Here are some examples of how it functions. Let’s say in a bookstore I pick up a book and just I hold it in front of me. Immediately I see projected onto the book’s cover the latest reviews, ratings, and so on. Because again the camera processes the image, the image is recognized, and then through the wireless connection all the data are mobilized, they come back, they are projected. Or if I want to check the time, I only draw the circle on my left wrist and the projector displays a clock on my right arm. Or when I hold my fingers at arm’s length to form a square, the system recognizes this gesture as framing a scene, snaps a photo and saves it. And you so you see you have this pseudo-transparency. It’s a magic universe almost. And of course, bad sexist as I am, from my I admit it male-chauvinist perspective, I immediately imagined how such a device could transform sexual interaction. Like I look at the woman and the projector immediately sorry it’s immediately projected on her her characteristics, no? Easy to seduce but likes jazz and Dostoevsky, good at fellatio, whatever you want. It’s very practical, you just look at it everything is, no? In this way the entire world becomes a multi-touch surface while the whole internet in the cloud, absent, is constantly mobilized to supply additional data. Pranav Mistry, the guy who invented this, emphasized the physical aspect of this interaction. Till now, internet-aided computers isolated the user from the surrounding environment. The archetypal internet user is a geek sitting alone in front of a screen, oblivious to the reality around him. With SixthSense, with this machines, I remain engaged in physical interaction with objects. The alternative either physical reality or virtual screen world is replaced by a direct interpenetration of the two. The projection of information directly onto the real objects with which I interact creates an almost magical mystifying effect. Things appear to continuously reveal or rather emanate their own interpretation. Paradoxically this means that the latest technological ideas bring us back to the pre-modern universe in which meaning resides in things themselves. The gap between reality and meaning, the defining feature of modernity, is undone. This is why SixthSense does not simply represent a radical break with our everyday experience. Rather, it openly stages what was always the case, and that’s what I want to insist on. What shocked me with this invention is that at its most magic, it just brings out what we are all the time doing. Just replace the computer with the big stock of our ideological prejudices and so on and so on. To return to the consciously politically incorrect bad taste example that I gave, forget about all this technology. If I am, I hope I’m not, who knows, if I am this kind of a male-chauvinist sexist, isn’t this effectively happening when I look at an attractive woman? Would she like to do this, does she like that music or whatever? Or to give you maybe a clearer example, isn’t it that racism functions exactly like that? You see a person and the as it were ideological illusion of racism is that, of course not in a literal projection but in a projection which is all the more brutal, you see there all your ideological prejudices. For example, if you are anti-semitic and the guy is a Jew and just innocently smiles, you see in this smile all the cunningness—why is he friendly to me? What does he want from me, money, does he want to cheat or you know. So again, what I like here, this is typical of the practice of ideology, is how the more the experience is immediate and you can celebrate this like that guy Pranav Mistry does as the end of this alienating Cartesian—Descartes is one of the bad guys that I like, you know—universe. I mean, he is good here to be blamed for everything. Al Gore even blamed Descartes in one of his earlier books for all the for all the catastrophes of ecology, no? Because instead of this how should I call it harmonious interpenetration between our universe and reality, we get a radical gap between our world of meaning and reality out there and so on and so on. What we get here is an apparent return to pre-modernity, but nonetheless as you mentioned already, a fake pre-modernity which in a way is not simply to be condemned because I think what is nice in this example is that it’s not that it’s a fake now. A traditional reactionary would have said, no this is a technological fake, it’s no longer a true authentic pre-modern universe. I claim yes, it is a fake, but it is a fake which retroactively makes also the pre-modern experience something which was a fake. Like to give you an a problematic example, this is I also think the catastrophe with so-called virtual sex. It’s not that now we have virtual sex once there was real sex. The problem with virtual sex is that in some sense you discover that sex always already was virtual. What do I mean by this? You know the popular definition of masturbation, which is you do it to yourself but with an imagined partner. Jacques Lacan, my favorite dogmatic point of reference, once made a wonderful remark claiming that if masturbation is a is sex with an imagined partner you are in reality alone, what if real sex has the structure of a masturbation with a real partner? That is to say, the partner is there but not as in with all Judeo-Christian theological weight, not as the neighbor, the abyss of another person, but just as a kind of a prop to enable you to stage your fantasies. You are really with your fantasies here. In this sense, what if our standard sexuality always is structured as masturbation with a real partner? That is to say, you do not really relate to the other as other, you just use the real other as a prop to stage your to stage your fantasies. You remain within yourself. And don’t be shocked here, I’m a good guy here, very traditional. I believe in love. I’m not claiming all sex is this. I claim precisely a very simple romantic if you want thesis: in love you do reach out to the other, which is why love is not as it is usually a mistake love is not idealizing. In love you do not idealize your partner. In love is the magic moment when you are able to assume all the imperfections of your partner but nonetheless all the magic remains there. Okay, let’s not get lost in this melodramatic point, but tell you that I claim that so when people talk about post-modern, post-secular world and so on, this invention by Pranav Mistry is something which comes pretty close to it. That we have a kind of a return to pre-modernity but let’s call it technologically reconstructed pre-modernity, which again renders this fake inextricably between the universe of meaning and our perception of reality. How to break out of it? The only way I think is what in structuralism we call the differential approach. Differentiality in the sense that what matters is not only what you see but what you don’t see or don’t say. What is absent is, as Hegel would have put it, a determinate absence. It’s constitutive of what is here. To give you an example, my god, the most classical one. You know which are from Silver Blaze, one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, the best known lines from Sherlock Holmes. When Sherlock Holmes asks an inspector, "Do you remember the strange accident with the dog the last night?" The other guy says, "But the dog did nothing." "That was the strange incident," no? What does this mean? Where is ideology here? Let me give you a wonderful dialectical joke from Ernst Lubitsch’s film Ninotchka. In just a small short scene where the hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream. And it’s wonderful what the waiter replies, maybe you know it, I’m sorry. Waiter replies, "Sorry but we have run out of cream, we only have milk, so can I bring you coffee without milk, not coffee without cream?" It’s deeply true. Although you will say, but the guest gets exactly the same, no, it’s not the same thing to get coffee without milk or coffee without cream. Here okay I’m sorry, I don’t have time to go deeply into the theory of what is implied here, because why do we add cream or milk to coffee? Because coffee in itself as every commodity is not enough. You know, as they say, every commodity has to have a certain magic like no as they put it, Coke, that’s it. And that it, it’s like when you fall in love with a woman you never can say what it is, no? I mean, that’s elementary of love. If you can say I love her because of her legs, eyes, then you’re already a mental accountant. You know, like that girl has nice legs, eyes, that one has beautiful breasts, that one toes, and then you say okay this one has four or five features, this one wins, I love you, no? It doesn’t—it must be an X. And this X as a rule—I’m so sad we don’t have time to go into this—the mystery of love is that this X should be a misperception, sorry, should be a weakness, a failure, an imperfection. I remember some when were they still in my youth, my god, time passes, some twenty years ago they were the ultra-models, Cindy Crawford and Claudia Schiffer. And I read a simple stupid text about how people relate to the two of them. And the result was that a large majority would prefer to live with Cindy Crawford and when they were asked why, the answer was: you remember she had a small mole here? They say the other, too much anxiety, she is too perfect. You need you need a small imperfection. And incidentally I’m so sad we don’t have time to go into this because this is the problem with love today, if we will have time I will go a little bit more into it. In our narcissistic era, did you notice how love or fanatic sexual engagement are themselves becoming transgressive? Now you will say I’m bullshitting. Ah, let me give you a couple of examples. Did you see the last James Bond film, Quantum of Solace? Politically quite progressive. To cut a long story short, James Bond saves the Morales regime in Bolivia from some reactionary company. But did you notice something else? It’s the first James Bond where at the end you don’t have the sexual act between Bond and Bond girl. In all others you have. Now you will say this is one example. Ah, let’s go to the lowest of the lowest of the lowest, which means Dan Brown. Did you notice how in The Da Vinci Code you have Robert Langdon and the grand-grand-grand-grand-daughter of Jesus Christ? Did you notice no sex? And I even claim that this is why poor Jesus Christ himself has to be engaged in sex up there, to mask, cover up the fact that there is no sex here, you know. Like this is a very nice reading of X-Files that a friend of mine, the British Lacanian Darian Leader, proposed. You know X-Files, all the time something happening from out there aliens, why? To cover up the fact that nothing happens here between the two of them, no? All these poor aliens have to bang on our doors, no? So what I’m saying here is that okay that’s Da Vinci Code. Then one of the big candidates for the worst novel of all times, The Lost Symbol. There is not even erotic tension there, nothing. Now things become mysterious. Let’s go to Angels Demons. There is sex there in the novel between Robert Langdon and Vittoria Vetra, but not in the film. Where are we? In the good old days of manipulative capitalism, Hollywood as we say was adding sex to make things more attractive. Now Hollywood is deleting sex. I am tempted to link this to another phenomenon which my good friend Alain Badiou, he drew my attention to it. Namely he read one of this in a French daily newspaper one of this ads for for dating and marriage agencies which goes like this—it works also in English because for falling in love, tomber, we use the same word to fall—it says something very precise, it says: "We will enable you to be se trouver, to find yourself in love without the fall, sans tomber." And that’s the point. In our narcissistic—this is why we liked all these agencies and effectively I think we are gradually in a limited way but nonetheless returning to this pre-modern tradition of arranged marriages or dates, but okay it’s no longer the relatives but the specialists who do it. The idea is the following one: I mean falling in love is something terrible, let’s admit it. You have a good normal life, you you drink in the evenings with friends, maybe a one-night stand here and there, everything is perfect. Then let’s say you really passionately with all sexual passion fall in love. Your life is totally ruined, everything turns around it and so on. Which is why I read this today, I was shocked. This morning I flew from New York on United and you know United their journalist Hemispheres. I open it and it said there we are outsourcing work and so on—they forgot to add torture and so on what they are outsourcing—and then they claim isn’t it time for an active businessman or woman today to outsource love life? And it’s the same idea, like we will organize all for you. I think it’s too cheap to talk here about alienation and so on. The basic idea I claim is that we more and more fear this very openness exposure to the other. You know this moment of vulnerability which, let’s be brutal as you Walter kindly mentioned this class struggle versus multiculturalism, no, this moment which I detect in the topic of harassment. Harassment is I think one of ideological categories today. I don’t mean this in any ominous Stalinist sense. I mean ideology in the sense that you take a problem which is a real problem, but the way you formulate a problem mystifies it. Like harassment, of course it describes a very real problem and I’m totally for harsh punishment whatever you want, sexism, racism and so on. But unfortunately harassment tends to mean something more. It’s even its opposite I claim, namely ask yourself the Wittgensteinian question, not what does it mean but how does it work in our language games and so on. Isn’t it that we tend to use the word harassment when in whatever way the other as a desiring being becomes too intrusive, comes too close to us? For example, a typical French, I know better the situation here in France, racist today is a liberal, he would never admit he is a racist. He would say oh I love blacks, their music beautiful, but. And then comes the but. Usually in France they say I don’t like the smell of their food, I find this intrusive. Or it can be I think the classical topic on which Spike Lee played nicely in his how should I call his early movie Do the Right Thing: it’s music, no? Blacks are okay but in these boomboxes their music annoys me and so on, or the way they smell, the way they laugh and so on and so on. And again what makes me afraid in this topic of harassment is that hidden in it is the opposite of what it wants to be. Don’t harass me means don’t come too close to me. So in so far as we read tolerance as no harassment, it means precisely I don’t tolerate your over-proximity. Okay, but back to coffee where we began. So we have this coffee and it’s always missing the key ingredient, the mystical one, it’s like you know in a woman that something which makes you fall in love. And I claim that this is why we add things to coffee because coffee is not coffee in itself. It’s a little bit like at some point in California it was even prohibited to import them, they had to be smuggled from Canada, namely do you remember, now you can get them I hope, so-called Kinder Surprise egg? You know, just an empty eggshell like like egg and then within a small plastic toy. I like this because it’s a kind of a metaphor for perfect commodity. It’s a commodity chocolate, but it’s as if they are telling you: "We know what’s your dream, in commodity there is something more, well, here you have it this stupid plastic toy, here you have it." The true mystery of commodity I claim is what—now you will tell me of course but but what about those purists who like coffee, just plain coffee? Ah, coffee can be its own supplement. How? If you know the history of cinema there is a wonderful example from Andre Bazin, the French great theorist of cinema, who said you know in the late 40s Western, the movie the movie genre found itself more and more in crisis. And as you probably know the first reaction was to combine it with another genre to obfuscate this crisis, like you know Seven Brides for Seven Brothers whatever it’s Western with musical. Then even a very good one like Raoul Walsh's Pursued with Robert Mitchum, Western with film noir. Then the problem comes what about two films a couple of years later, mid-50s, two mega-Westerns: Shane and High Noon. Andre Bazin proposed a wonderful theory. These are meta-Westerns, they are Westerns but where this meta-dimension is Western itself. It’s a Western which as it were relates to itself as its own higher level norm. So let me go on. What am I aiming here with this negation and so on, like negation inscribed into the very identity? I can give you another wonderful erotic I claim example—don’t be afraid, very modest. It’s from the old English working-class drama Brassed Off with Ewan McGregor before he became Jedi when he was still a working-class hero. There is in the middle of the film a wonderful scene where the hero accompanies a young pretty woman home, they are flirting, then at the entrance she tells him: "Would you like to come up to my flat for a coffee?" He answers: "Yes gladly but there is a problem, I don’t drink coffee." Her answer with a smile: "No problem, I don’t have any." You see, nothing is said, just something is offered and then taken back. But the result is not zero, the result is an almost embarrassing obscene invitation to sex. Why lose time with this type of jokes? Because I claim they offer maybe one of the keys as to how ideology functions in our allegedly post-ideological times. Today ideology is not so much in what is directly said but you must locate let’s call it the determinate absence. What is not said but implied. You must find—you are getting coffee, ideological coffee, but the true question is am I getting coffee without milk or without cream, no? What is there? For example, there is already I cannot restrain from doing it because I think that one of the great spiritual catastrophes implied by the fall of communist regimes is the disappearance of wonderfully refined sometimes political jokes, no? Exactly the same paradox, you find it in a well-known joke from socialist Poland where you know things were always unavailable usually in the stores. So a guy enters a store and asks: "You probably don’t have butter, no?" The answer: "Sorry, no no you are—we are the store which doesn’t have toilet paper, not butter. The other store there is the one which doesn’t have butter," and so on, no? So again it’s always this question. You know in Brazil they told me we are a wonderful nation, when there is a carnival all people dance together. Yeah, I told them, but you know, there is a poor worker who goes to carnival and dances there just to forget that he cannot properly provide for his family and there is a rich guy who goes there to dance so that he feels one with the people or whatever, no? Like you know what I mean, one is dancing without milk, the other one is dancing without cream. Or to put it yet in another way, let’s take again this Brassed Off example. I think we can well imagine a similar dialogue where the charming seductive girl is Dick Cheney from late when United States were preparing the invasion of Iraq. Let’s say Cheney went to Europe to convince Europeans to join them in attacking Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction. European replies trying to squeeze out, no? "But you are better equipped, we don’t have proper facilities to search for weapons of mass destruction." And probably Dick Cheney answered something like, "No problem, there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq." You know what I mean by this, that let’s be clear, I’m not saying here I support Julian Assange, but in a very specific way. What he did is not simply to bring everything out from the most personal level to international level of interstate relations. No no, one has to be refined, you cannot simply say everything. It’s an obscenity already at the interpersonal level. Even Kant, who is the philosopher who is the fanatic of say everything, never lie, concedes that there are situations where you are obliged to lie. And he in a very nice way gives as an example, for example you have a friend who is mortally ill of cancer, no? You will not tell him "Oh my god you look like shit when will you drop down." You will tell him of course "Oh you look a little bit better, I’m so glad to see you" whatever, no? So the point is what? That when you say something like this, a lie or not saying everything, the problem is in what do you imply. Here I think we should refer to a again wonderful scene from a Marx Brothers movie which is otherwise not so good, one of the late ones, Go West. Where at the very beginning if you remember Groucho Marx enters a train station and there at the how do you call it office whatever wants to buy a ticket. And then he gives to the selling person there a whole bunch of dollar notes and says "It’s okay, don’t count it" and so on, no? The guy nonetheless counts them and says "But it’s not enough." And Groucho says "Well I told you not to count it," no and so on. You see, he said don’t count it but with the implication "Don’t bother everything is okay," no? Can’t we again use the unfortunate Dick Cheney and claim that you know, he said in an interview I forgot to which public medium that let’s be frank—he was of course referring to torture and so on—let’s be frank, to really fight the war on terror some things has to be done discretely, let’s not talk about it, something like that, no? But then we discovered what was included. We thought okay, a little bit of hard pressure and so on, no? But then we discovered that there were many other things included in this like him privileging Halliburton and other companies and so on. And we can well imagine him telling us "Okay okay some things have to be done discretely, let’s not look into them," then we would tell him "But wait a minute we have here your own private interests Halliburton" and he would say "But I told you we shouldn’t talk about it" and so on. You see this type of gap is crucial in today’s ideology. Maybe the crucial dimension is not the lying, is not so much lying about what you say, but lying about the implications. You manipulate at the level of generating the wrong implications. Permit me another example from cinema that I often like to use, maybe already know it I’m sorry again, one of the true I claim masterpieces of Hollywood left, John Carpenter’s They Live. A very naive from it’s a wonderfully naive story of an unemployed guy called John Nada—Nada nothing in Spanish, so proletarian whatever you want—homeless, jobless, wanders around LA and enters an abandoned church and finds there some glasses. Some glasses, mysterious. Then he walks around the city, puts them on and discovers that these are literally critique of ideology glasses, like you put them on and you see the true message. For example, he sees a big poster: Go to Hawaii, have the holiday of your lifetime and so on. He puts the glasses on and it says: Enjoy stupid enjoyment, don’t think and so on, like the true message. Now you will say this is simplistic, stupid. Ah, it’s not so stupid, I will immediately tell you why the movie is nonetheless more intelligent than it may appear. The first thing I like is that to see the truth, the true message, you have to put glasses on. This is already a good beginning because our common sense would have tell tell us when we don’t see things clearly we have some glasses which distort, you have to do is to take the glasses off and see things the way they are. No no no, you need glasses, which means to put it sorry in half Stalinist terms, you need education. Truth doesn't come spontaneously. I think we have to accept this pessimistic message, which is why in a wonderfully ambiguous scene of the film, when the hero tries to bring his best friend to put the glasses on, the friend resists and there is a very strange fight which goes on for ten minutes. I mean it functions precisely this difficult message that freedom doesn't come for free. Another thing that I like here is that the movie turns around the standard ideological gap. In the standard ideological gap it's the true message ideological that you get directly and as it were what you see implicitly, for what you have to put the glasses on to see it directly, what is only implied is precisely the ideological enjoyment, that which with which ideology bribes you, as it were, no? So I’ve written three books celebrating Christianity so don't take this wrong, but nonetheless I have just some problems with this Catholic pedophilia, the shameless way they treat it. And I would say let me imagine in the same way you see a poster "Dedicate your life to God, become a priest." Then what would you have seen putting on glasses? "And you can have the small boys if you do it discretely," and so on. Or let me do it a more brutal racist example. Imagine of course they didn't function like that but imagine we are in the 20s in the south of the United States, Ku Klux Klan and so on. Okay, you see a poster like "Defend our Christian way of life" and so on whatever. You put the glasses on and you read "And if you do this next weekend we can go and lynch some blacks and rape some black girls" or whatever. I mean this is an extreme—I don’t have time to go into it—but this is an extremely important lecture I think, which already was understood by Theodor Adorno of Frankfurt School and by others, that totalitarianism is not simply terror, renunciation. It always also bribes you with some kind of a false transgression. Like this was a wonderful discovery from me when I learned that Mikhail Bakhtin, maybe you heard about him, he is the Russian fellow traveler of the of formalists who in his book from mid-30s, the work of Francois Rabelais, celebrated this carnival culture, you know, the magic moment when explicit rules are suspended, beggar is king, king is beggar, and all my leftist friends are ecstatic, oh my god it's like utopia. Unfortunately a friend of mine, a Russian theorist of art Boris Groys, told me that now they discovered the archives of Mikhail Bakhtin who was exiled to Kazan, a small city well, and it's absolutely clear that far from celebrating carnival, his book on Rabelais it's a kind of a coded theory of Stalinist purges. The real carnival were the Stalinist purges where precisely today you are the king, member of Politburo, tomorrow you are in Gulag the English spy traitor or whatever, no? And all of Stalinism played wonderfully with this coded way, wonderfully in a terrified way. For example, my favorite story of this codification is that Molotov, at some point the second third guy after Stalin, got into total panic at some point. How? You know when there were the big political trials, the it was very important to read closely what the accused were accused of, because you get this is the Kremlinological symbology math-bology, much more interesting than Robert Langdon, no? Because many things you can learn. For example, when there was the I don't know the trial against whom, I think this was already late Stalin, the Jewish plot so-called, no? The idea was that the doctors were part of the imperialist plot to kill Soviet leaders. And they were enumerated them: Stalin, Molotov and so on and so on. Then a week later Pravda wrote that now the investigation came to new results and again this list of victims, the ones who whom the plotters tried to kill, was printed, and Molotov got into a panic because his name was not there. This meant he is not in, you know, because his name was not—I mean it's a crazy universe I admit it. So let me go on not to lose time. So again what I find interesting in this glasses theory is that it doesn't follow this traditional way where again you get explicitly the direct ideological call "Sacrifice yourself whatever," and with glasses on you see the obscenity—small boys, raping blacks whatever—that you get. It's the other way round. The direct message is the obscenity, pleasure, whatever. The implicit message is the injunction which which sustains it. And I think that this brings me back to the beginning. It would be very interesting I claim maybe to just imagine when you are not sure about certain humanitarian ad or whatever, imagine you putting glasses on and imagine what can one read there. For example, my classical example, you see an ad with the disgusting manipulation, the the disfigured face of a black young boy and then the message something like: "For the price of a couple of cappuccinos you can make a difference, you can save his life." Okay fine, let's put the glasses on. Isn't it something we know there is big injustice in the world, but for a price of a couple of cappuccinos you can not only not care about it but even feel good that you really did something or whatever. That's the whole point I claim. It's the same as with—now I will be very brutal you will not like it probably—let's take all this ecological bullshit. No, I again, ecology is the problem today. But what is bullshit is how it is ideologically rephrased through this lifestyle ecology, you know, trying to make you feel guilty—did you recycle that can of Coke and so on? Which is or let's go even further. Let's take organic apples. You buy them, I also do, but do you ever ask yourself why do you buy them? I claim that the majority of us don't really believe that they are any better than those beautiful genetically manipulated apples. It's more that we're buying ideology for by paying more. It makes us feel good, isn't it wonderful? Even when I buy apples, I'm part of a big project to save the mother earth, I'm doing something and so on and so on. It's a wonderful way of pseudo-activity. You know, pseudo-activity in this sense was my friend Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller drew attention to these paradoxes of magical thinking today. You know how the most stupid example: you sit at home at TV, you watch your favorite basketball, baseball, whatever club, and you shout there, "Oh go on go on!" Of course you don’t believe it, but nonetheless you act as if your shouting can magically influence the game. I claim when you buy organic apples you do something quite similar to this frankly, no? I mean again I’m not saying we shouldn’t do it, I’m saying let’s just be aware that when we are doing it, we are also doing it to forget about what is really to be done. And again, I’m sorry if I repeat an old example but I like to repeat it. Here the ultra-example is Starbucks. I think they should be awarded a kind of a Nobel Prize, not for economy but for for for literature or if there would be Nobel Nobel Prize for thought or what. You know why? Because they did something quite ingenious. In the dark old days of ordinary capitalism we were consumerists, then we felt bad for being consumerists and you had to do something against it, no? Whatever. Dedicate your life to big humanitarian causes, do something whatever. But at least there was a gap. What is Starbucks doing? I love them. I love them which means I would bomb them but cannot, no? You remember all the posters you get when you enter a Starbucks coffee house, no? Like our basically the message is, our cappuccino is more expensive, true, than with the others but percent goes to Guatemala children, the other to I don’t know bring war to bring water sorry to the desert whatever. Isn’t this a wonderful thing? The message is you don’t have to stop being a consumerist because the price of redemption, anti-consumerist price for solidarity, we include it in the price of a commodity, you know. So it’s included, you can go on and you can feel well and so on and so on. Okay, so now we have a problem. The problem is—oh my god I will kill myself—okay, I okay now I will do something, don’t be in a panic, I will stop shortly. What I only want to do is to play this game: let’s say it’s the end and the debate begins and I ask myself a question, what did you want to say in the remaining part of your talk? I will be brief. Okay. First, unfortunately I didn’t have time, I wanted really to develop just an idea of what is going on today. The basic idea was already proposed by some economists that the role of being unemployed is changing today radically. It’s not just the old Marxist notion of reserve army of labor, the system is more than ever systematically producing large number of people who all of a sudden became basically for life unemployable. Or even worse, the big crisis in Europe with students, they are educated but it’s in advance clear there will be no job for them, so that we have radically to expand change the notion of exploitation. Connected this I wanted to develop how I don’t like with all the discourse analysis and so on the notion of you know how we always like to focus on domination, how we are dominated, regulated and so on. I claim that domination without exploitation becomes something all too ideological, it obfuscates the basic capitalist paradox and so on. So then I wanted to do something which I hope that you—I don’t know why—I felt that it should be Stanley in your spirit, no? To show up how to obfuscate all this stuff ideology functions. For example, my one of the guys that I really like, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, the French theorist of catastrophe and so on, has shown how contingency and injustice of capitalism—this is how ideology works at its best, best I mean most efficient—far from being an obstacle to the functioning of capitalism is what makes capitalism palpable. And he gives this very simple example of for example injustice. I work hard, you were lazy but because of some irrational unexpected market movements I go bankrupt, you succeed. This is what makes capitalism tolerable from what point? From the point of resentment and envy. Because in this way I can retain my fake dignity. I can tell to myself, "Oh that guy is a jerk blah blah but that’s capitalism, it’s all contingent and so on." It would have been much more difficult and dangerous to have a society where the success of people would have been really determined by their actual achievements, merits, and so on. Because if then you are a loser, then you are really a loser. No way to claim you know, it’s—it would lead to much harsher which is why I’m deeply suspicious of the idea of intolerance. I don’t know why I associated this idea with your in good sense evil spirits, you know, sorry. The next thing I wanted to develop against the same line is that I’m sick and tired of this religious idea even on Wall Street you can see it: "Oh, against greed and so on." Don’t blame it on psychology. If anything, capitalism at its purest, it’s not a point of egotism and so on. True evil is not egotism. Here I wanted to develop a wonderful theory of Rousseau where he says that egotism is not evil. It’s very easy in contrast to what theologians are saying to pass from your egotist concern to the common good. With a little bit of reasoning you get it. Evil begins when—and this is the famous Rousseau distinction between amour de soi, love of the self which is natural, and amour-propre, the perverted preferring of oneself to others. Amour-propre is not simply I want my own profit but you know as they say about capitalism it's not enough for me to win, the other has to lose. And that matters more than me winning. The logic is the one which is maybe constitutive of my nation, because one of the proverbial attitudes of a Slovene farmer is you know, a fairy comes to him and tells him: "Would you like for me to give you a cow for free, but I warn you warn you I will give to your neighbor two cows." He said: "No, rather kill one of my cows but kill two of the neighbor," you know, like the all this. In other words, my point was that we cannot criticize capitalism in the sense of oh it's greed. No, capitalism, Walter Benjamin—there are other Walters unfortunately—was right, capitalism has the structure, it’s a perverted religious ethics. Capitalism says expansion, self-reproduction of the capital must go on no matter what the utilitarian human costs and so on and so on. So you don’t need any any mega-ethics, you can criticize capitalism precisely from a simple utilitarian standpoint and so on. Which now brings me to my conclusion. Now that we live in this times of turmoil and so on, what would have been—I don’t have the right to give any advice—but nonetheless I will do it, no? Precisely the first attitude would be: don’t blame people and their attitudes. The problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system which pushes you to be corrupt. I’m here a kind of a Brechtian—not cynic but—you know Bertolt Brecht, I don’t like him too much, but at some point what I like in him is this implicit very Protestant theology which emphasizes the fall of man. His idea is you can't change man, man is by nature evil and so on. And there is a wonderful dialogue of those Herr Keuner, Mr. Keuner stories, where a guy says: "People are manipulated by media, by newspapers, we have to change people so that they will not fall for this manipulation." And Herr Keuner, Mr. Keuner, the good guy Brechtian hero says: "No, people are the way they are, you can only change newspapers." That’s history: change newspapers not people, no? The same goes here. The second thing that I think should be emphasized is that this moment here is a dangerous one. You know my old joke how the system is offering us more and more a product without its without its dangerous ingredients: coffee without caffeine, ice cream without fat, beer without alcohol and so on. The danger is that this protest will also turn into a—and incidentally that’s my problem with multiculturalism, the official one—the other it celebrates is a decaffeinated other, this shitty other with holistic attitudes and so on. My cure against it was years ago when I was in Missoula, Montana, I encountered an Native American, Indian. He gave me the lesson of a lifetime. First he said, "I hate the name Native Americans. What does it mean? You are cultural Americans, we are native or what?" And he told me, "I prefer to be called Indian." You know what he gave me as the reason? He said, "Because at least then my name is a monument to the stupidity of white men, you know, who thought they are, you know." Then he said, "I hate this patronizing attitude, you know, oh you have the holistic attitude towards nature," and he told me, "I can give you books which demonstrate that we have burned more forests and killed more buffaloes than you ever will do, white men," and so on. This is true anti-racism, not that patronizing idealization. So again, what I'm saying is that at this point we should resist—they're easy to resist direct enemies who say you know, oh lazy guys who do nothing, they destroy property, American values. To them it’s I claim pretty easy to answer. Like property, my god, I already said this on Wall Street maybe you know it, when demonstrators are reproached for destroying private property: listen, the the crisis, if by property we mean what even Tea Party people mean, not some financial speculations but real hard-working people earning their houses, then destroyed more private property than all the left united if we were just destroying property and so on. So the other thing that, you know, we’re in what sense in a fragile moment. And here I’m not bullshitting, I’m precisely not saying "Oh, the first moment of a communist revolution," I’m not crazy, I mean. Communism in the in the 20th-century sense is over, it was a catastrophe. Even I’m claiming that the only thing that remains of communism are the problems, problems of commons, nature and so on. Communists are well and alive today, they are willing they are today as you know when they are in power the most efficient capitalists, no? When I was in China I read a wonderful commentary where they say forty years ago Deng Xiaoping thought only capitalism can save China, now in a crisis we behave as if only China can save capitalism, no? And there is a very serious problem here which is that the marriage between capitalism and democracy seems to be over. What is really emerging in China, Singapore, and spreading around is a capitalism more efficient, dynamic, productive, destructive than ours, but which fits perfectly an authoritarian regime. So what I’m saying is that what I like about these protests is the fact that a certain taboo is broken. To go back to my beginning, it’s no longer just we have to get rid of corrupted people or whatever. It’s allowed to think that there is maybe something wrong with the system as such. But that’s it, let’s be clear, we, at least we don’t have the answers. Which is why we should absolutely resist that kind of a blackmail which I call clinching blackmail. You know what is clinching in boxing, I think? You don’t want to be beaten so you embrace the enemy. The biggest practitioner of clinching is I think Bill Clinton. You know, here is his reaction to Wall Street. He said protests are on balance a positive thing, but he said, I quote him, "They, protesters, need to be for something specific, not just against something because if you are just against something someone else will fill the vacuum you create." So then he said support Obama’s plan for concrete measures. But I claim this precisely is what we should resist today. Not because there are some ominous plans to destroy the system. A certain dissatisfaction emerged. And let’s use it as, as it were, zero-level starting point to start thinking, where no one has the privilege to pretend to have any answers. I am absolutely not saying that we intellectuals know although it's incredible what a demand there is on this. I mean, there are people as you probably know better than me who don't take me seriously, but nonetheless I got many messages where people told me "Professor, could you write us a precise program, what should we do next week?" I don't know. I mean, so we intellectuals don't know, those who have programs are bluffing or are like Clinton—and I'm not saying he is immoral, he just, what does it mean what he says? You know if you are a woman, you know how this works when you are in so-called which are I think very subversive thing hysterical outbursts. You do hysterical outbursts and then a man says: "But what do you want really?" This "what do you want" is very oppressive. It really means compelling you to translate your rage or whatever into the form of a demand which is already part of the hegemonic system and so on and so on. So I think that precisely we should resist this. We should simply start thinking without illusions. We don’t know but also we should avoid this kind of a pseudo-Maoist fascination, "trust the people they know." No, people also don't know. Nobody knows. We don't know, people don't know. We maybe know what's the problem and here the metaphor I like is that of Claude Levi-Strauss who says said something wonderful about the prohibition of incest, that it's not a problem but an answer to a question that we don't know what's the question. And maybe this would maybe be the formula of what we should do. We should look at the protests as reactions, answers to a question which we should formulate maybe. We cannot provide answers, maybe we can ask the right questions. And through this interaction something may emerge. Why? Because to conclude, just the last lines—they are maybe even known to some of you I’ve already published them—you know, the immediate reply would have been, "But are you dreaming? Is the change possible and so on?" Ah, what is possible, what is impossible today, you may have noticed, it is an extremely ideologically invested matter. Did you notice how on the one hand, concerning technology and private pleasures, more and more everything is possible, no? Like, you know, the media are telling us what—my god, I read on the 10th of October in Pittsburgh, it's pretty terrifying, did you read it? It's the first time that the guy, a crippled guy, already learned how to move his hand just by the power of his thoughts. They implanted some some stuff here which is not even invasive, penetrative, but just reads the signals and after practicing for months he can move objects just by thinking about it. Now this is nice but it has its dangers, because our most elementary sense of freedom is "my thinking is here, reality is out there." What happens with our subjectivity and so on? I'm not a catastrophist, I'm just saying we have to think. There are problems today, ecology, biogenetics and so on, we have to start thinking. The only way in which I am a communist if you want, is only in the sense that the problems we are dealing it are the problems of commons: ecology, our commons, biogenetics, our commons and so on. I'm not saying "Oh, return to Leninist party," which is ridiculous. But what I want to say is that okay, in the domain of technology and then through through cloning we can become practically immortal, always new organs, all this goes, and all the obscenities that I like to tell here like—I was told I cannot resist saying it—in New York there is now a surgeon who specializes in cutting a penis into two. You can do it with two whatever. Okay, all this is possible. But did you notice how then but when you say "Let's spend half a percent more money for health care," impossible! We will become incompetent, whatever, and so on. This is the sad thing for me how we can imagine the end of the world being hit by an asteroid or whatever, we cannot imagine spending a little bit more on health care or whatever, no? Here and it's not a priori impossible. Are we aware to what extent even today's capitalism functions on certain ideological prejudices? For example, recently I was in Norway and friends told me that there—and it's not any socialist terror of social-democratic government, it's simply part of their social pact, shared national consensus—that in an average private also company, the gap between the lowest paid cleaning man or lady and the top CEO is to maximum to And again it's not some state regulation, it's simply people somehow accept it. So what I'm saying is that this is the problem as again Fred put it nicely: we can imagine the end of the world, we cannot imagine a small change in capitalism. So really now the conclusion. In mid-April of this year something wonderful happened in China. I love these accidents. The government issued—it's not a joke, I checked it with my friends there because it sounded too crazy to be true but it is—the government issued a regulation prohibiting in all narrative media—that is to say cinema, TV, TV stories, comics, novels—all topics concerning alternate reality and time travel. The official explanation was that it’s too serious a matter, history, the great history of Chinese people, to be left to such stupid play. Of course, the fear is: it’s not good to allow the people to even imagine alternate possibilities. But I think this is a good sign for China. You know why? Because at least people still obviously imagine it, so they need censorship. The tragedy of us is that we don’t even need this censorship, we already cannot imagine it. So maybe, maybe this is the stuff of us intellectuals. We are not magicians, we don’t know what to do, my god. But what we can do is just to use all these demonstrations etc. to as it were open up the space for thinking, to widen the scope of what is considered possible or even what is considered impossible. Because I hope you Stanley would also like, we both share a certain—now we will both be linked for this—dogmatic Stalinist spirit. What do I mean by this? For example when people say "Democracy blah blah," no, in certain things I like total dogmatism. Where? Let's take rape. I wouldn't like to live in a society where you freely debate rape. No, sorry to tell you, I would like to live in a society where the idea that rape is something horrible, inadmissible, is totally dogmatically accepted so that it's not even a matter of debate. If somebody advocates rape, you don't have to—you know, if you debate it, you already make the Reagan mistake. You know what I mean by Reagan mistake? Reagan, this was a wonderful moment thirty years ago, twenty ago, I remember President Reagan was once accused that he is close to those some people who advocate who deny the Holocaust, no? And his defense was a legendary one. It was "No it's not true, whenever at my dinner someone denies Holocaust, I always fight him." Of course the question is what kind of friends does he have that he has all the time to to to defend that there was a Holocaust? So what I’m saying is that at this level of what is considered possible, impossible, maybe it's our duty to change. Like maybe we will not be at least not in this easy way immortal, but maybe we can change social regulations a little bit, no? Because you know, again to conclude with my standard line: remember, the true utopia is not to change things. Unfortunately the true utopia is that the way they are, things can go on indefinitely. This is the true utopia. Which is why we who without any communist dreams, new party or whatever, we who just want to open up the space of questioning a little bit, we are the true anti-utopians. I'm sorry if I was too long, but at least you maybe understand now why my friends call me Fidel. Not because of politics, but you know, Fidel comes, comrades, just ten minutes of remark, and then if he is very tired it's three hours, no? Thanks very much for your patience. Thank you. Slavoj didn’t actually give me a question, planted a question, but I'm not—it was only to be used if no one else had questions. I'm up here just to say there are microphones on either side of the room. And what we thought we’d do is just have people line up at the microphone and then go back and forth from one to the other. Um, so I’m going to wait for a second to give people a chance to get to the microphone. Um, and if no one is at the microphone, then I will have to ask the extremely obscene question, um, that I was planted with, and I won’t do it, so just give it a second. I don't know what game are you playing now? I’m not—I’m not playing—here. Where? No, I don't, I don't—here. Let's— But you are bluffing and you don’t even have the question probably. Just please, yes. It was about a dog. Just I hope it works with sound. So you just go there and there and I'll let you— No, but the mic? I hope it works, no? No it doesn't—okay, it does, perfect. Thank you. Um, one of the premises of critical thinking of course is reflexivity, and it’s the awareness of the conditions of possibility of. And when you talk about this incredibly charming and of course I’m enthusiastic about it in a more in a political sense than in an epistemological one, this idea of putting the lenses and kind of seeing the truth. I mean there’s a fiction of transparency that we as intellectuals are able to unveil the reality. But of course we have to be aware of our own standpoint when we do that. So I don’t know, I’m very curious about that idea of the sort of standpoint—we don’t have the questions, which I think is something that I appreciated listening to you saying that at the last part—but this idea that there’s a move of unveiling and there’s an assumption that there’s some hidden truth out there that we’re going to be able to find. And how do you reconcile that as a standpoint of being an intellectual with the reflexivity of actually being aware of the own conditions and very relative conditions. It's a wonderful question. Again, the only problem is that it’s as you admitted it’s a one-hour answer question. Okay, very briefly. Very briefly. My answer would have been that the truth to which we do have access is not a positive truth in the sense of I magically step out of myself and see the things the way they really are. What we can see is the inherent untruth of what is going on. What do I mean by this? A wonderful example that I really liked. For example, Jacques Lacan says somewhere something which has a male-chauvinist twist, I don't like that, but if you take the form of it it's wonderfully true. He says let's take a husband who is pathologically jealous about his wife sleeping with other men. And he says even if all his suspicions are true, the wife is really doing it, his jealousy is
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still pathological. And in this sense you know I'm not saying compare it with truth. I would like to apply this to racism, for example, I already did it in one of my books to anti-semitism. Let's say we are in the 30s, late 30s in
still pathological. And in this sense you know I'm not saying compare it with truth. I would like to apply this to racism, for example, I already did it in one of my books to anti-semitism. Let's say we are in the 30s, late 30s in
Slavoj Žižek
Germany. I am a Nazi, you are not a Nazi, we
Germany. I am a Nazi, you are not a Nazi, we
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debate
debate
Slavoj Žižek
the
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role of the Jews. The moment we formulate it as "let's compare racist prejudices
role of the Jews. The moment we formulate it as "let's compare racist prejudices
Slavoj Žižek
with
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the Jews the way they really are," if you are the anti-Nazi, you so sell your soul to the devil. Because the true problem is not that of abstract truth in the sense of "are Jews really like that?" Once you debate about this, you come to some kind of a stupid mixed result: "Jews exploited the Germans." Well in some vulgar sense this was up to a point true because, purely formal sense, because some Jews definitely were rich and you know or "I don't know Jews were seducing and corrupting German
the Jews the way they really are," if you are the anti-Nazi, you so sell your soul to the devil. Because the true problem is not that of abstract truth in the sense of "are Jews really like that?" Once you debate about this, you come to some kind of a stupid mixed result: "Jews exploited the Germans." Well in some vulgar sense this was up to a point true because, purely formal sense, because some Jews definitely were rich and you know or "I don't know Jews were seducing and corrupting German
Slavoj Žižek
girls." Well, I hope they did as everyone. You know what I mean? That's not the problem. The problem is not: is it true? The problem is: why did the Nazis in order to sustain the consistency of their ideological...
girls." Well, I hope they did as everyone. You know what I mean? That's not the problem. The problem is not: is it true? The problem is: why did the Nazis in order to sustain the consistency of their ideological...